John Huston (1906-1987),son of noted actor Walter Huston and father of Angelica established his reputation as a scriptwriter at Warners before his writing and directing venture with his first feature film, 1941's The Maltese Falcon, which in turn was the third and arguably finest adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled thriller starring Humphrey Bogart as sardonic sleuth Sam Spade, Mary Astor as the treacherous Brigid O'Shaugnessy and a supporting cast of bad apples including Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr. and Peter Lorre. After a Bette Davis vehicle, the controversial In This Our Life (1942). Huston then enlisted in the army where he would produce several subversive documentaries of great quality for the Signal Corps. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) a screen telling of B.Traven's eponymous novel, reunited him with Bogart in its Mexican tale of three men lured to disaster during a quest for gold - Tim Holt and Walter Huston co-starred.
In Huston's masterful Key Largo (1948) Bogart- at long last the nice guy who gets the gal portrayed by love of his life, Lauren Bacall - while Edward G. Robinson was the thug trying to gain entry to the USA by way of the Florida Keys. We Were Strangers (1949) was a lugubrious tale of Cuban revolutionaries, starring John Garfield and the beguiling Jennifer Jones. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) with Audie Murphy, the most decorated American serviceman during the second World War, ironically portrays the neophyte soldier. This project ensued a life-time rift between Louis B Mayer and his new production chief Dore Schary, as detailed in Lillian Ross's enthralling blow-by-blow account of the film's making, Picture.
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The African Queen (1951) which was co-written by James Agee and with excellent starring roles for Bogart, who took home an Oscar for his performance, and Katherine Hepburn as ill-fitted lovers taking on the German navy in World War I Africa would restore Huston's commercial reputation. By 1952 he exiled to Ireland with his fourth wife and worked mostly away from Hollywood but still essentially within the American film industry for the most part (later he moved to Mexico). He would reprise his acting career after an interval of three decades, but in this as in the films he directed, the occasional remarkable artistic successes were outnumbered by the disasters (though there is not a hundred- per cent agreement among critics on which is which).