John Huston’s gift as an actor was to make a powerful man seem entirely at ease. We rate him most highly in Chinatown, where Noah Cross’s genial manner is enough to make us uneasy.
Fi1m perspective
In Chinatown (1974), John Huston’s Noah Cross has the genial ease of a man who expects to be listened to. Huston does remarkably little to insist on our attention, and gets it anyway. We found him unsettling because that comfortable manner makes it hard to separate the apparent friendliness from the authority behind it. Roman Polanski gets a performance that needs no conspicuous display of menace; the lack of strain is precisely what makes Cross worth watching.
After directing The Maltese Falcon (1941), Huston continued principally as a director and writer, with acting parts becoming more substantial in the 1960s. For Otto Preminger, he played Cardinal Lawrence Glennon in The Cardinal (1963); in Casino Royale (1967), he was M, the head of MI6 in a Bond spoof. Between them came The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), with Huston as Noah and the voices of God and the narrator. These are different jobs, but the recurrence of men entitled to give instructions is telling. Casting him meant authority could be established with little explanation.
That ease matters especially beside the other performances in Chinatown. Jack Nicholson makes confidence dangerously persuasive, while Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Cross Mulwray has to work to remain composed. Huston gives Cross no comparable sense of effort, so his presence unsettles a film already alert to how people present themselves. We would not want him to underline the threat more heavily: an actor determined to look sinister could make the character easier to dismiss.
His acting career was occasional, and we would be wary of turning one superbly suited role into a claim for everything else. The repeated casting as powerful or eccentric men suggests how much directors valued the authority he brought with him. That can be useful, but a familiar presence still needs a character worth playing. Start with Chinatown, rather than working through the acting credits out of duty.
Biography
John Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. Born on 5 August 1906 in Nevada, Missouri, he died on 28 August 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island. He began his career in Hollywood as a screenwriter in the 1930s before making his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Huston directed numerous films, often writing the screenplays himself. Among those for which he is best known are The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1952), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Prizzi's Honor (1985). He also acted in several productions, including the role of Noah Cross in Chinatown (1974).
