September 21, 1990 | Clint Eastwood rides into White Hunter, Black Heart at full gallop — literally — and pounces on his every line, dominates every scene in which he appears, with much the same ferocious vigor.
As John Wilson, a flamboyant filmmaker modeled closely after the late, great John Huston, Eastwood paints a character study in bold strokes and dark shadings. All the complex, contradictory facets of Huston’s public (and, judging from biographical accounts, private) personality are here: the condescending courtesy and the tripwire rage, the insinuating charm and the tyrannical bullying, the fanciful grandiloquence and the impulsive recklessness.
Eastwood brings each into sharp relief, in a grand performance of great wit, style and cunning, under his own confident, accomplished direction.
White Hunter, Black Heart is nominally a work of fiction, based on the 1953 novel by Peter Viertel. But Viertel, who worked on the screenplay for Huston’s The African Queen, and whose friendship with the director diminished during that classic film’s tumultuous pre-production period, never has pretended that his work is anything but an artfully fictionalized version of real-life events. Huston himself recognized as much when he read the novel prior to its publication. Still, he gave the book his approval — and even offered Viertel suggestions for a plot twist that made John Wilson seem even more heartless.
John Huston invented his own roguish image, then played the larger-than-life role to the fullest throughout his life. Apparently, like so many other stars, he couldn’t resist the chance to beef up his part.
Several filmmakers have expressed interest in filming White Hunter, Black Heart during the 37 years since its first publication. (Urban Cowboy director James Bridges once prepared his own adaptation, and is credited here as one of three scriptwriters.) At first glance, the story appears to be a natural for the movies, with something for everyone: a glamorous anti-hero, an exotic setting, a sharply-defined character conflict, a gossipy behind-the-scenes look at a movie location. But it took someone with the muscle of a Clint Eastwood finally to push the project onto the screen, if only because the story is not nearly as simple, or commercial, as it might appear.
White Hunter, Black Heart is a film of dark obsession and unspoken dread, with bracing undercurrents of savage, sardonic humor. Beautifully filmed on location in Zimbabwe, and loosely based on John Huston’s misadventures during the 1951 location shooting of The African Queen, it begins by establishing John Wilson as a maverick genius who defies his producers and rebels against the tyranny of audience expectations.
“To write a movie,” Wilson tells screenwriter Pete Verrill (the Peter Viertel surrogate played by Jeff Fahey), “you’ve got to forget that anybody’s going to see it.” He does it his way, and let the critics, the money men and the “popcorn eaters” be damned.
Once in Africa, however, it quickly becomes obvious that Wilson is less interested in creating a work of art than in turning his own life, and the lives of those around him, into high drama. He casts himself in the lead role of the dashing, daring man of letters and action, taking great glee in insulting lesser mortals (especially bigots, anti-Semites and Hollywood producers) who dare to annoy him. Sometimes, the supporting players rebel, and improvise — Wilson picks a fight with a racist hotel manager, and is soundly thumped. Most times, however, even the rational Pete Verrill is content to follow direction.
The tuning point, for the drama as well as the Wilson-Verrill relationship, comes when Wilson fixes on the idea of going on safari and killing a bull elephant. Verrill is dismayed, charging that such wanton slaughter is “a crime.” But Wilson disagrees: “It’s bigger than that — it’s a sin. It’s the only sin you can get a license and go out and commit.” And a sin so great is impossible to resist if you’re a man who wants to play God.
White Hunter, Black Heart keeps us guessing. Is Wilson really so obsessed with shooting an elephant that he blithely disregards his responsibility to shoot a movie? Or is the hunt simply Wilson’s way of delaying, maybe even avoiding, the inevitable moment when he has to back words with deeds, when he must make the great movie he’s been promising everyone?
Eastwood, in his performance as well as his direction, appears ultimately to come down on the side of obsession. But there is more than enough tantalizing ambiguity to the storytelling, and enough complexity to Wilson’s character, to allow the audience to make either interpretation.
Like Honkytonk Man and Bird, two of Eastwood’s other ambitious efforts as a director, White Hunter, Black Heart gives us a portrait of the artist as a self-destructive enigma. The supporting players are aptly chosen — George Dzundza is particularly fine as a producer patterned after Sam Spiegel, while Marisa Berenson and Richard Vanstone make acceptable stand-ins for Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. And Jeff Fahey makes a worthy foil as Pete Verrill.
In the end, though, this is the story of one man, a movie with one focus. Eastwood isn’t being selfish here, he simply is telling the story the best way it can be told, at the slow, measured pace of a man telling an entertaining anecdote to people he knows are hanging on his every word.
Just the way John Wilson, or John Huston, would tell it.
