Some stories are simply so good, and so applicable to various professions and lifestyles, that you cannot tell them once. Whenever a filmmaker makes a film on a protagonist pursuing a devouring obsession that is unnecessarily places and his colleagues in danger, you think they take their crack to “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. Films as different as “Jaws” by Steven Spielberg, “The Bridge on the River Kwai” by David Lean “and the Tepid story of Ron Howard of the real event that inspired Melville’s novel,” In the Heart of the Sea “, all investigated such madness. Appropriately, however, it is possible that nobody strikes the nail on the head more squarely than John Huston.
Huston was the perfect director of “Moby Dick” because, to a certain extent, he was very close to Full-Ahab on the set of “The African Queen”. His limited self-destruction (“borderline” because, despite his erratic behavior, he delivered a masterpiece which earned Humphrey Bogart his only academy of best actor) almost put the winner of the Pulitzer James Agee prize in the tomb (the writer, who shared many vices of Huston, would find dirt four years later). The worst of everything was that Huston asked to shoot “the African queen” on the spot in the Belgian Congo – not because it was aesthetically ideal, but because it was an elephant hunting paradise.
The co-scriptor of “The African Queen” Peter Viertel (who intervened for age after his 1951 heart attack), wrote a barely fictitious novel which was closely based on hunting madness of the great Huston game, and, after years of development, Clint Eastwood finally brought the “white hunter, the black heart” of Vietel. He is one of the biggest Eastwood flops, but he never stretched more as an actor, and he has never expressed such ambivalence on what a man means.
Eastwood explores the dark side of cinema to White Hunter, Black Heart
Eastwood was 60 years old in 1990, and he seemed Hellbent by making his mark as a filmmaker. He had failed with the admirably discreet “Bird”, which gave the director of the Jazzz-Fan the opportunity to explore another type of artistic self-destructive, but he was on a much firmer terrain with “Hunter Blanc, Black Heart”.
In terms of artistic temperament, Eastwood is a different breed of Huston. While the latter was prolific in its own right, Eastwood eliminates all the distractions when he shoots a film. He thinks he did more than half of the work by throwing properly and bringing together the crew with which he worked, in some cases, decades. It is not the hedonistic machine that Huston could be up to it; He does not drink deep in the night, does not put himself in combat and will not sort in the morning on a few tennis sets. This is why he is still alive and talks about making a new film at the age of 95.
Huston’s behavior on the set of “The African Queen” was the antithesis of the Eastwood process. But it is not the carousse that seems to me to be, it is the obsession to kill an elephant which is part of the star in a role which, to date, marks it as the most difficult part he has ever assured. The Huston Eastwood version (named John Wilson), is an incorrigible bastard. He has a moral (for example, Wilson loses a fight against a hotelier who racly abuses a black employee), but the interest of making this film is to put an elephant. Wilson never declares convincingly why he must kill such a majestic creature; He just supposes that his power as a Hollywood director will give him the opportunity to do something that few people on this planet have ever done.
“White Hunter, Black Heart” is not classic Eastwood, but it is essential for the way he castigates Wilson for his abuse of power – who makes another man kill because when the moment arrives, he does not have the nerve to lower the beast. Wilson is a great filmmaker, he is based on principles, but he does not believe that the rules of the world apply to him. At the end of the film, it seems more than reprimanded. All the talent and bravado of the world cannot hide what he knows how to be true: as a man, John Wilson is fraud. The failure of “White Hunter, Black Heart” (which made $ 2 million against 24 million dollars) led Eastwood to make the worst film of his career with “The Rookie”.
