This Day in Film History (Hustons Find Oscar 'Treasure')

March 24, 1949—In an unprecedented—and still unrepeated—Academy Award feat, father and son Walter and John Huston won Oscars for the same film, as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre proved what other Hollywood directors/producers, with less talented relatives, had been claiming for years about nepotism: Don’t knock it till you try it.

"Many, many years ago,” Walter Huston (seen here on right, with co-stars Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt) joked as he accepted his Best Supporting Actor statuette, “I raised a son and I said to him, if you ever become a writer or director, please find a good part for your old man."

The Barrymores may have been Broadway’s “Royal Family,” as the thinly disguised 1927 dramedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber called them. But on film, in an unbroken string over three decades, the flame of Walter, John, Anjelica and Danny Huston has burned brighter and longer.

Both families share two things: Irish roots and troubles with substance abuse.

Maurice Barrymore, father of John, Lionel and Ethel, took his stage name from an Irish peer who had been an ancestor. Canadian-born Walter Huston was the child of Scottish and Irish parents, and John moved to Ireland in the 1950s, even becoming an Irish citizen in 1964.

The drug and alcohol addictions of the Barrymores, stretching from John and Lionel down to granddaughter Drew, have been chronicled ad nauseum by biographers and tabloids and don’t bear repeating here. Less well-known is John Huston’s rough year in 1933, when he was arrested for drunk driving twice and was involved in an auto accident that left a young woman dead. (The grand jury absolved him of blame, but he was so traumatized that he left Hollywood for a year.)

While exuding a glamour and tragic quality that have eluded the Hustons, the Barrymores have not equaled them in sustained quality of cinematic achievement.

Just consider this: Even when the films he wrote and/or directed aren’t appearing on TV, John Huston’s voice lingers in modern American film.

In White Hunter, Black Heart, Clint Eastwood tries to find a midpoint between his own steely tones and the tobacco-tarred, gin-soaked timber of Huston’s intonation, in a film that consciously echoes the older director’s experiences filming The African Queen. 

More recently, Daniel Day-Lewis may owe his Best Actor Oscar for There Will Be Blood less to his well-known physicality than to his camouflaged British accent in favor of an American one that mimicked Huston’s gravelly Noah Cross in Chinatown (another film featuring an evil capitalist who wrecks a child as much as an ecosystem).

The mysterious force of greed that seeps through Chinatown is addressed even more squarely in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For one of the most uncompromising entries of his often-superb, always fascinating filmography, John Huston turned to his father for a pivotal role.

I’m afraid that there’s a certain breed of cinephile who ignores a film for the sole reason that it’s not in color. By definition, that deprives them of the thrill of seeing Walter Huston in action.

Smoothly seguing from vaudeville to theater to talkies, then from leading man to supporting actor, Walter Huston displayed wide range for directors as varied as D.W. Griffith (Abraham Lincoln), Frank Capra (American Madness), William Dieterle (The Devil and Daniel Webster), Michael Curtiz (Yankee Doodle Dandy), and Lewis Milestone (Rain, in a performance that keeps getting more relevant with the years, as a repressed preacher).

Now, his son posed a different challenge: dispense with his dentures to play an old prospector in John’s cinematic recasting of the novel by B. Traven (a recluse who carefully shielded his identity even as he gave permission for his story to be filmed). John judged correctly, though, that his old man wouldn’t mind the blow to his vanity so long as he could steal scenes as the wizened coot, and so he did.

Today, certain scenes in the film verge close to political incorrectness, especially when the three prospectors encounter Mexican bandits. But more often than not, the film succeeds in its multiple gambles—its location shooting south of the border (a choice that, the director shrewdly guessed, would keep Warner Bros. studio heads at arm's length), its pessimistic themes, and the casting of the three male leads. (At various times during the film’s six-year gestation, John Garfield and Ronald Reagan had been mentioned for the role that ultimately went to Tim Holt; George Raft was conceived of as greedy, murderously paranoid Fred C. Dobbs, the character ultimately played by Humphrey Bogart; and Edward G. Robinson was an early choice for Walter Huston’s part.)

Fittingly enough, John Huston capped his unexpected late-career flowering by directing daughter Anjelica in Prizzi’s Honor (gaining him an additional honor as the only filmmaker to direct a parent and child to acting Oscars) and The Dead, in which father and daughter tipped their caps to their Celtic roots, bringing to moving life the James Joyce novella about misunderstandings and family secrets. (John’s son Danny has also made his mark as a screenwriter and actor.)

Many of the best films of John Huston’s career have focused on failed dreamers and noncomformists—not just The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but also The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, Moby Dick, and The Man Who Would Be King. 

In an unhappy childhood spent shuttling between his divorced mother and father—who had decided to leave the seeming security of a job as an engineer for one as a vaudevillian—young John appeared to be collateral damage in one of these unfulfilled quests. The film he created as an adult for himself and his father provided a most un-Hustonlike happy ending after all.