John Huston's career is curiously unequal. The life of Toulouse-Lautrec is viewed through the prism of Pierre La Mure's dim-witted tear-jerker, while The Misfits is eked out with bits of arty-craftiness like Marilyn Monroe embracing a tree trunk to show she loves life in all its forms. Often between the idea and the execution there interposes a kind of gangling, almost cynical nonchalance, at other times an almost naive solemnity. One feels John Huston is two people—the thoughtful, basically rather ascetic, middlebrow, and, far more interesting, the rugged extrovert for whom life is keenest during the brawl, the hunt, and the genial drinking-session. In Huston the two often seem to cancel out rather than link up—perhaps after all his best films are those where Bogart, saturnine, craven, vulnerable, establishes the emotional core which somehow seems to me to be lacking in We Were Strangers and Moby...