For Gallo, the task wasn’t simply a matter of chopping away at the book; first it had to be understood. “You see, you gotta distinguish between what appeals to you about
Gallo remembers working with Huston as if it were an intense seminar with an old master, which, in a way, it was. “There are a lot of things in the book — images, good images, startling images — but whenever I would have anything like that in the script, the question would always boil down to: ‘It’s very good, but
Inside the Farolito, someone yells, “Silencio, por favor!” The Mexican family on the hill behind Gallo has yet to say a word.
— Malcolm Lowry
Here is John Huston, seventy-seven years old, five times married, director of thirty-eight motion pictures, actor in dozens more, winner of awards, storyteller, poker player, horseman, long-ago prizefighter, legend. He is in the Farolito, his squinting eyes taking in everything. He sees an ancient Mexican man playing with a four-piece band, a man so old he remembers seeing Halley’s comet flash through the skies in the first year of the Mexican Revolution. He sees nine whores, a transvestite, a dwarf. Along one wall is a bar, and behind the bar is Indio Fernandez, one of the greatest Mexican directors, now almost eighty, a survivor of prisons and gunfights, acting in this movie as a favor to the man everybody calls John. Behind the camera is Gabriel Figueroa, the fine Mexican cinematographer, another old comrade. Huston looks at them all, suggests a change in a whore’s costume, adjusts the angle of the camera.
There is, of course, a judgmental line on John Huston these days: He doesn’t work at directing any more; he has the job done for him, looks on, and cynically picks up his fee. In the five days that I watched him direct
On this day of shooting, he seems to be everywhere, tall, slightly hunched, oddly frail, so bony now that his hands seem immense, like drawings by Egon Schiele. He has had a heart bypass and he wheezes from emphysema. But John Huston is not yet old.