HUSTON: A LAMP ON DARK SIDE OF LIFE

It was a few years ago. John Huston, who died Friday morning in his sleep at the age of 81, was then in his 70s and not long out of the hospital, where he had surrendered a fair proportion of his insides to the surgeons. He had gone a few hard rounds with that fell sergeant, Death, but had eluded arrest. Yet the word around town was that a great career was over, and at the time it was a reasonable conjecture.

Huston was shaky and thin, although his thinness had the look of seasoned hickory so hard you couldn’t whittle it with a good penknife. It was his first night out and he was having a quiet dinner at Ray Stark’s house with the producer and a friend.

He was full of recollections, as of his friend the critic James Agee, who wrote “The African Queen” for him. Against all the evidence, it was clear that evening that the world had not heard the last from John Huston.

As it turned out, of course, some of his best work lay ahead, including “The Man Who Would Be King,” that glorious adventure that would have taxed the physical resources of a film maker half his age, and “Wise Blood” and “Under the Volcano” and “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The Dead,” the last film, from a story in “Dubliners” by James Joyce, which we will get to see later this fall.

“Fat City,” Huston’s telling of Leonard Gardner’s fine novel about a pair of down-and-out fighters, was a commercial flop but one of his most characteristic and personal works. Huston, who had been a professional fighter in his own young days, knew the men and the milieu, and what he knew more deeply than anything else was that the will to survive is in itself a form of winning.

He made some films that will last as long as the medium itself, and some others he could not be reminded of without wincing. There are films he made to sustain his life style as an Irish lord of the manor and others that simply sounded like better ideas than they turned out to be.

Yet the best of his work, and the bulk of it, was as personal and identifiable as any great director’s must be. There was not necessarily a visual signature. The linkage, so to say, was that it was the work of a master storyteller who combined a writer’s passionate admiration for eloquent words with a film maker’s sure command of the grammar, the vocabulary and the possibilities of the camera.

He had a particular affection for underdogs, hopeless causes and the dark side of life. He tackled films--Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” was a prime example; “Wise Blood,” the Flannery O’Connor novel about religious obsession, was another--of such literary merit and such finally despairing tone that the only certainty was that the mass audience would stay away in ruinous numbers.

But Huston got the projects going on the strength of his own reputation and persuasiveness, and he leaves the industry with a diadem of jewels to sparkle amid the prevailing mediocrity of its safe and hollow choices.

Caution was not in him, in his private life or in his work. He lived with a bold extravagance and when, in his films, he went over the top, he seemed to be acting out the creed that you’re only as good as you dare to be bad. It could be said of him, as of a handful of other creators, that his failures were more interesting than many film makers’ successes. “Sinful Davey” and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” will be interesting to see again when plenty of box-office smashes will have gone as stale as last year’s popcorn.

A jovial cynicism and a robust romanticism were opposite faces of his unique coinage. The strains were conjoined in his lovely spoof, unappreciated in his mid-’50s day, “Beat the Devil.”

Like John Ford, he appreciated the value of legend and he was not shy about spinning a few legends around himself. Legends survive, particularly in a tough town. But sentiment became Huston as well, and the efforts of his final years to work with his children, enhancing their careers by his participation in their work, is an affecting story touch that befits a legendary figure who was perhaps not always as dutiful a parent as he might have been.

His final film, “The Dead,” is dedicated to the young woman, identified only as Maricella, who has been his companion for the last several years. That, too, is an affecting gesture by a man who, with all else, created a style of dashing gallantry that was his alone, and not likely to be found again in the present world.

“I thought he was too tough to go,” Michael Caine said Friday, “because Sean (Connery) and I went to his deathbed several years ago to say goodby, and the next thing I’d heard was that he’d made three more films. While he was living I thought he was a legend, and now he is.”