John Huston’s Glorious Losers Hollywood’s literate man of action The shape of John Huston’s career was significantly different from that of any other first-tier Hollywood filmmaker. Between 1941 and his death in 1987, he directed 37 feature films, most of whose screenplays he either wrote or co-wrote—among them such major works as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Wise Blood (1979), Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and The Dead (1987). Like all prolific artists, Huston was uneven, but what is more to the point is that he continued to make films of quality until he died ( The Dead was posthumously released). By then, every other surviving studio-system director had been driven out of the business by