The most consistent feature of John Huston's very diverse output is a certain brisk directness of style. He is not necessarily incapable of subtlety, but he prefers to state rather than to imply, to drive straight through the middle of a subject rather than circle it warily first. This means that his failures—like most of The Bible—are startlingly shameless and undisguised. But the manly, neck-or-nothing approach can also work astonishingly well with a lot of otherwise intractable material. We last saw it doing so in that weird hodge-podge Casino Royale, where only the Huston episode at the beginning made no attempt at subtlety and no bones about playing it up to the hilt as farce. This worked, while everyone else was much too clever by half…. [Right] at the other end of the dramatic scale, Huston's direct attack has paid off with an almost equally surprising...