Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of Irish Halloween Terror, ‘Banshee’

“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

“It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if it died in the night, no one would know.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “Banshee,” originally published in Gallery, September 1984 issue, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

I suspect that my readers will want to explore the rest of this story, based simply on this ominous opening by Ray Bradbury. But I came to the tale by a different route: from watching a few years ago a nearly 40-year-old adaptation on the cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater.

As I noted in this blog post from August 2020, it struck me that the plot of the story—a meeting over a potential project between a meek screenwriter and a veteran Hollywood director—reenacted, in a fictional setting, the rocky collaboration between Bradbury and Hollywood legend John Huston over the 1956 adventure movie Moby-Dick. 

While preparing a recent talk on Huston, his daughter Anjelica and father Walter, I was struck anew by how this tale of Hibernian horror provided unexpected insights into his complex personality.

Bradbury came from America in 1953 to meet with Huston—first in London, then Dublin, and finally the Georgian manor outside the Irish capital that the director was renting.

Late in life, Huston complained that his reputation for sadistic dealings with film personnel stemmed from a single figure: Freud leading man Montgomery Clift, who, in this telling, had presumed on his host’s tolerance by engaging in a late-night encounter with another male guest at his Irish home.

Huston was gilding the lily, however. At least two other people who worked with him accused him of the same misbehavior, albeit under different circumstances.

Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edna O’Brien declined to speak to Huston biographer Jeffrey Meyers in significant detail about their work adapting A.E. Ellis’ novel The Rack. 

But a few years later, in her 2014 memoir Country Girl, she was more open, accusing Huston of insulting her screenplay as “half-baked rubbish” after praising it earlier in their discussions. Following a crying fit, she blurted out to Anjelica Huston that her father was “a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man,” according to the actress’s A Story Lately Told.

O’Brien’s anger was so pronounced that she felt the need to vent twice in print. 

The first time was expressed more obliquely, in the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides. Alluding several times to James Joyce’s novella “The Dead,” which Huston adapted into his final feature film, O’Brien depicted him as a dinner party latecomer called “Reggie,” “obviously a man of note” with “something of the quality of a panther.” 

For all his charm and attractiveness there is something ruthless about him, conveyed nowhere more devastatingly than when the female protagonist, “Miss Lawless,” discovers that he has been “chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave.”

That same callousness towards ex-lovers and prospective new ones becomes the principal count in Bradbury’s indictment of “John Hudson.” The author hinted far more bluntly than O’Brien had about the source of the character. 

Not only do the transparently “fictional” and real-life characters have similar-sounding surnames, but each is working on a film where the hero is “plowing the sea,” with wife and children off in a foreign land during the screenwriter’s visit. Even the locale of the meeting, “Courtown,” is the name of Huston’s home at the time.

The story is not merely “autofiction”—a genre in which the author and the protagonist are deeply similar but not identical—but more like an autofictional revenge story.

Bradbury, still smarting three decades later over Huston’s condescension and practical jokes at his expense, gave the director’s fictional counterpart a grisly end delivered, appropriately enough, by a ghost of one of the many women he seduced and dumped. 

(A “banshee,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is, according to Irish folklore, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death.)

Ray Bradbury Theater lasted six seasons; this adaptation was the season one finale, indicating how close the author felt to this material.

Ironically, the TV version of “Banshee” starred Peter O’Toole, who had visited Huston’s estate when they both resided in Ireland’s County Galway. 

I’m not sure if Huston even heard about the episode in the year and a half between its airing and his death; his emphysema had grown so bad that he needed to be connected to an oxygen tank, so he might have been beyond caring about his portrayal by then. 

In contrast, Bradbury continued to care very much. Like O’Brien, his disenchantment with his former cinematic hero remained so intense that he needed to exorcise it a second time.

The title of his 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, echoes another roman a clef about a thirtysomething screenwriter’s creative tension with a director closely modeled on Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart.

(Jennifer Dale, pictured here, played the troubled, wailing supernatural spirit in "Banshee," while Charles Martin Smith was Bradbury's alter ego, the young, much-put-upon screenwriter Doug.)

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on ‘Human Madness’)

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851)

In the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab personified “human madness.” Gregory Peck, shown here, played the character in the 1956 film adaptation directed by John Huston.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Prizzi’s Honor,’ on a Hit Man’s Head-Scratcher)

[Charley is telling former girlfriend Maerose about new love Irene Walker.]

Charley Partanna [played by Jack Nicholson]: “I met her in a church. It just happened. I knew she was the woman for me. She'd organized the scam in Vegas. I go looking for the bad guy and it turns out to be my woman, can you imagine this? Not only that—Pop tells me she's the piece man for the Nettabino contract. Just the same, I love her, Mae... I love her.”

Maerose Prizzi [played by Anjelica Huston]: “Well...”

Charley: “How can I live with this? I gotta do something about it. I gotta straighten it out.”

Maerose: “Then do.”

Charley: “Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of these?”— Prizzi’s Honor (1985), screenplay by Richard Condon and Janet Roach, adapted from the novel by Richard Condon, directed by John Huston

This Day in Literary History (Ray Bradbury, Lyrical, Starry-Eyed Futurist, Born)

Aug. 22, 1920—Ray Bradbury, who imagined the opportunities and terrors of a science-dominated future in approximately 600 short stories, novels, poems, screenplays, and teleplays of indelible vividness, was born in Waukegan, Ill.

Like other mid-20^th century writers in the sci-fi, horror, and crime genres such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silberberg, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Roald Dahl, Bradbury benefited from two vehicles: first, pulp magazines, and second, anthology TV series. These forums furnished the opportunity for these authors to be productive and to expose their work to mass audiences.

In high school one year, I spent an entire quarter on science fiction. The nun who taught the class, Sister Margaret Bradley, did not use the term “science fiction,” but rather “alternative futures,” because she did not want to emphasize gadgetry but speculation on the possibility of changing human nature. Bradbury, I think, was the author who best epitomized what she had in mind.

The best-known work in Bradbury’s seven-decade career is probably Fahrenheit 451 (1953). That warning on the dangers of censorship, coming after the collapse of Nazi Germany but at the height of the McCarthy Era in the U.S., became the basis for a “Read-a-Thon” this Saturday streaming over YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

The Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, along with other public and university libraries nationwide, joined together for this event.

Bradbury was concerned not just with what human beings might encounter in the future but with how their frailties might lead them to squander the possibilities of all the new vistas opened to them.

Such was the case, for instance, with The Martian Chronicles (1950), in which mankind repeatedly attempts to colonize the Red Planet, only unable to shed longtime prejudices in this new environment.

The fantastic visions of Bradbury’s fiction are manifested through a sensory, even lyrical style, marked by striking metaphors and similes. “Once you hear a metaphor of mine, you won't forget it,” he said in a 1990 interview with Starlog Magazine.  A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse, boom, there's your metaphor. Once you hear that, you say, ‘Gee, I gotta read that, I wonder what happened?’"

In the impressionistic opening paragraph of one of his most anthologized stories, “The April Witch” (1952), he conveyed the (literal) flight of fancy of a 17-year-old witch seriously thinking of giving up her extraordinary power if she can only experience human love:

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.”

Movies started to shape Bradbury’s imagination during the silent-film era, and his education in the performing arts was even more thoroughly grounded in 1940, when he became active in amateur productions of actress Laraine Day’s Wilshire Players Guild for Mormon actors.

From early in his writing career, filmmakers were anxious to adapt his fiction, or even engage him in original work for the screen. But his experiences with Hollywood were frequently unstellar and often unhappy.

It took Bradbury years to see virtues in Francois Truffaut’s first English-language feature, a 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles gave him a case of double agita: first, when a story from it inordinately influenced an early Twilight Zone episode and damaged Bradbury’s relationship with friend and series creator Rod Serling; and second, when NBC ran a 1980 miniseries based on it starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury dismissed as “just boring.”

But the experience that may have soured Bradbury most deeply on Hollywood was his assignment to adapt Moby Dick for the screen for John Huston. The legendary director, impressed with Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn,” asked that the sci-fi author work on adapting Herman Melville’s novel in Ireland, where the film would be shot on location off the coast of County Cork, Ireland.

The initial high regard that the two had for each other began to erode as they spent more than half a year revising the script. But Bradbury became particularly angry when the director pulled a maneuver that Orson Welles had originally tried out more than a decade before with Herman Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane: i.e., gaining co-screenwriting credit. Huston proved more successful than Welles in that effort, even managing to overturn the Screen Writers Guild’s decision to award sole credit to Bradbury.

Decades later, the two wrote accounts in which their initial admiration yielded to disgruntlement. In his 1980 memoir An Open Book, Huston confessed to bewilderment about an author terrified by airplanes and fast cars even though his fiction inspired authors, astronomers and astronauts to dream of the stars.

Bradbury responded first with the 1984 short story “The Banshee,” which depicted a screenwriter tormented by a womanizing, sadistic famous director on his remote Irish screen, then nearly a decade later with Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), whose title and quasi-fictional format recalled an earlier screenwriter’s account of working with Huston on location, Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart.

Perhaps the most satisfaction that Bradbury derived from adaptations of his work came with The Ray Bradbury Theater, a Canadian-American anthology series that ran for six seasons on cable TV. The series was nominated 10 times and won six for the coveted ACE (Award for Cable Excellence) from 1985 to 1992.

As executive producer and chief contributor to the series, Bradbury took a page from Serling in hosting the show. Unlike his estranged friend, his introductions framed the fantasy elements of the show squarely within his own creative process:

"People ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Well, right here.  All this is my Martian landscape.  Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. Just beyond perhaps is a small Illinois town where I grew up. And I'm surrounded on every side by my magician’s toyshop. I'll never starve here. I just look around, find what I need, and begin. I'm Ray Bradbury, and this is The Ray Bradbury Theater. Well then, right now, what shall it be? Out of all this, what do I choose to make a story? I never know where the next one will take me. The trip, exactly one half exhilaration, exactly one half terror.”

Bradbury’s passing in 2012, at the age of 91, elicited an affectionate and admiring post about the author by Nina Munteanu on the Scribophile writing blog.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Bruce Feiler on Adam and Eve, The First Love Story)

“The most underappreciated aspect of Adam and Eve is how they continually return to each other after periods of separation. They start life united, then Eve goes off alone. She could remain apart but instead returns to Adam. Once out of Eden, they could split, but instead they stay together. After losing a child, they separate and then reunite and have Seth. This togetherness in the face of repeated separateness is their first lesson for us: Learning to mend breaches is central to love.”— American writer and TV personality Bruce Feiler, “Adam and Eve and Us,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 11-12, 2017

(The image accompanying this post shows actors Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd as Adam and Eve in John Huston’s 1966 film, The Bible.)

This Day in Film History (“The Maltese Falcon” Debuts)

October 3, 1941—For once, Hollywood got a remake right, as John Huston, noticing the potential in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon that two prior directors missed, turned this seminal hard-boiled detective novel into cinematic gold.

The film, which premiered in New York City on this date, marked the film debut of Huston, a screenwriter who, after seeing how star Paul Muni altered his script for Juarez, vowed to have more control over his work in the future.

Here’s the ironic thing, though: the property that made his career was not really his. It’s not simply that this was an adaptation of a novel by someone else, but that his script changed nary a thing in it. 

Huston followed the advice of director Howard Hawks--"Film the book"--so closely that he had his secretary simply type the novel out as a screenplay before submitting it at Warner Brothers. It ended up filmed substantially in that manner. In fact, the neophyte screenwriter might have spent more time on storyboarding (two days) than he did on the script.

I haven’t seen the two prior versions of the film from 1931 and 1936. According to Roger Dooley’s encyclopedia survey of American film in the 1930s, From Scarlett to Scarface, the first was fine but the second (Satan Met a Lady) execrable--so bad that Bette Davis, one of the stars, went into one of her epic pitched battles with Warner Bros. over it.

To provide something of a good-luck charm for the remake, the director’s father, Walter Huston, transitioning from leading man to character actor, made an uncredited cameo appearance as Captain Jacoby. Seven years later, the son would return the favor to his father with a more substantial role, an aging miner in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which netted Walter a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Aside from brilliance on its own terms, the movie also began a fruitful collaboration between the director and star Humphrey Bogart. Indeed, it is crucial in the evolution of this icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

High Sierra, released earlier in the year, tweaked the gangster stereotype in which Bogie had been imprisoned, allowing audiences to see his character as human for a change. The Maltese Falcon provided the actor with a forum to show that he could play more than just gangsters. For those audiences who still had a hard time imagining Bogart on the side of the angels, though, The Maltese Falcon made his character, Sam Spade, rough-edged, cynical, and willing to lie while staying barely within the law. Without the box-office credibility that The Maltese Falcon provided, it’s difficult to imagine Bogart getting the chance to play the romantic lead in Casablanca—or, indeed, to ring the many subtle inflections in his characters that would mark his career from then on up to his untimely demise from cancer in 1957.

Huston and Bogart were kindred spirits, men who liked their whiskey and their women even as they tried to live by their own code of honesty. In all, they would make six films—not just hugely popular classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, but one of the great offbeat films that it would take later generations to appreciate, Beat the Devil (1954).

Somehow, though, this post wouldn’t be complete without considering the film’s femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and the actress who played her, Mary Astor.

The first thing to consider is the character’s name: About as Irish as you can get, which fascinates me because of my own family background. None of the films made from Hammett’s books really beats you over the head with an Irish character’s ethnicity. But two Irish-American women played roles in his early life and career: Josephine Dolan, a young nurse whom he married in 1921, and Peggy O’Toole, his secretary-lover later in the decade, and often rumored to have at least partly inspired the creation of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

In the first two versions of the novel, the character’s name was changed, but Huston insisted on retaining it in his version. When it came time for casting, the part almost went to an actress with an equally Irish name, Geraldine Fitzgerald. It’s interesting to think of what stamp she might have put on the role, but she rejected it, and it then went to Astor.

Both actresses already had rather checkered lives offscreen--Fitzgerald was rumored (and we know it now it for a fact, thanks to her son’s new memoir) that she bore a child out of wedlock to Orson Welles, and Astor was the subject of a headline-making divorce case in 1936 when, it was revealed, her diary went into lavish detail about her lovers. But both actresses were highly talented, and Astor would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year for The Great Lie.

Astor’s tremendous skill didn’t shield her from the agonies of aging in Hollywood, and by the late 1950s she had cratered into a mire of alcoholism and depression. As I learned from a fascinating post on the blog Neglected Books, a Catholic priest counseling her on her treatment suggested that she write for therapy. The result was not just one memoir, but two, along with several novels that, according to this post, deserve to be reprinted.

This Day in Film History (John Huston Cult Fave “Beat the Devil” Opens)

March 12, 1954—Perhaps the most unusual entry in the filmographies of Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones, Beat the Devil, premiered in the U.S. on this date. 

The film, directed by John Huston, sank like a stone at the time, but after another decade had passed, revival audiences were hailing this shaggy-dog narrative for its off-the-wall humor.

Peter Viertel and Anthony Veiller had originally been engaged to adapt the whimsical crime caper novel by the same name by James Helvick (the pseudonym for British leftist journalist Claud Cockburn). 

But one look at their screenplay led Jones’ overbearing producer husband, David O. Selznick, to urge Huston to bring Truman Capote aboard to rework the script, lest his wife's career go up on flames. (Three years later, that same concern led Selznick to fire Huston from his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms).

Though the location filming in Ravello, Italy, had its share of problems (e.g., communicating between English-speaking actors and directors on one side and an Italian crew on the other, not to mention staying in touch with the outside world in a town with only one phone), it sounds as if Huston and Capote reveled in each other’s company.

Usually better known for drama, Bogart trusted his frequent collaborator Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen) with this offbeat comedy, even though the director and Capote were often only finishing scenes just before camera crews were ready to start filming.

Bogie should have had another reason for concern—it was his production company that was footing the bill for much of the movie. Perhaps all the partying he did with the hard-drinking Huston made the whole thing go down a bit more easily.

This film might be the biggest eye-opener for those who only recall Jones for her sentimental (The Song of Bernadette) or romantic (Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, A Farewell to Arms) roles. Her character, Gwendolyn Chelm, has—well, a bit of a problem with the truth.

One of the eight characters pursuing uranium-rich land, Peterson (played by Robert Morley), asks Bogart’s character, in absolute stupefaction: “You mean Mrs. Chelm is an unqualified liar?" Bogie: "Well, let's say she uses her imagination rather than her memory."

In her blond wig and deadpan way with her lines (“Harry's been all out of sorts today; usually he's a wonderful loser"), Jones has never been better, in my opinion. The rest of the supporting cast—Morley, Peter Lorre, and Gina Lollobrigida as Bogart’s luscious but equally scheming wife)—are also a match for the principals.

While making the film, Capote trained his sharp eye on Huston. Five years later, in text accompanying photographs by Richard Avedon, Observations (reprinted more recently in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote), he gave what might be the definitive summation of the director’s “stylized person”: “his riverboat-gambler’s suavity overlaid with roughneck buffooning, the hearty mirthless laughter that rises toward but never reaches his warmly crinkled and ungentle eyes, eyes bored as sunbathing lizards; the determined seduction of his confidential gazes and man’s man camaraderie, all intended as much for his own benefit as that of that of his audience.”

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.