'Huston's Mexico' by Richard Vela

Later tonight I am off to see a screening of Huston's Under The Volcano - by coincidence while searching the Net - I cam across the above.

The book contains an interesting essay on Huston's Mexican films by Richard Vela which you can read below:

Bunuel on Under The Volcano

Personally, I've always thought that either Luis Bunuel or Orson Welles would have been the best directors to have made a film version of Malc's great novel. I have already posted that Welles apparently didn't like the novel - see Chartres in Orson Welles's F for Fake

Below is what Bunuel's thoughts were on making a movie version of Under The Volcano from his book My Last Breath 1987

I was only reminded of Bunuel's thoughts of making the film when I read an interesting post on his film Death in the Garden on Bright Lights Film Journal:

Luis Buñuel at one time expressed an interest in adapting Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano but dropped the idea not believing he could do it justice –– to my mind, a lost opportunity of epic proportions. Instead, in the early eighties, an aging John Huston turned Lowry's feverish, interior narrative into a suffocatingly literal tale of the last day of a cuckolded alcoholic sweating out his marital problems under the hot sun of Mexico.4 Whereas Huston was generally more in tune with kind of material offered by an adventure tale like Death in the Garden, you can imagine Buñuel in sync with Lowry's overloaded prose, using the Mexican landscape in much the same way the author did, to mirror the Consul's drunken but weirdly mystical, personal hell. Read more



Read a review of Death in the Garden on Flickhead

LOST WEEKENDS: ALCOHOLISM IN THE MOVIES

Mad Ave Journal Culture Editor, Kurt Brokaw has conceived, packaged and produced a new break-through series which explores the issues of how alcohol and alcoholism is portrayed in American film. It covers some of the greatest Academy Award winning titles, including such early classic films as "Lost Weekends" made in 1945, to Charles Bukowski's inimitable "Barfly" and all the way through to recent gripping films such as "Leaving Las Vegas".

"Lost Weekends" is a 10-Week Fall film series at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, a New York landmark, located at 2 West 64th Street and Central Park West. It will include screenings and discussions of the rarest and classic feature films on drinking and drinkers. As you know, Kurt Brokaw holds an MS and also teaches at The New School and The 92nd Street Y. Read more on Madison Avenue Journal

The series includes a showing of Houston's Under The Volcano.

Opening Titles of John Huston's Under The Volcano Movie

Continuing with posts relating to The Day of The Dead - one of the best things about the Under The Volcano movie are the opening credits directed by actor/filmmaker Danny Huston, John Huston’s son.

From the dvd insert:

“Gripping imagery consisting of…chiariscuro in the style of Goya. [Director of Photography Gabriel] Figueroa…would use color to create, from the early images of Firmin’s [played by Albert Finney] nocturnal wanderings, an allegorical universe that mixes death (sugar-candy skulls and banes, laughing masks) and celebration (garish lanterns, garlands)…a night peopled by wild illusions…suffocating qualities…[the] poetic frenzy of an alcoholic.”

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

According to the screenwriter of John Huston's Under The Volcano movie, Wieland Schulz-Keil, in his essay The 67th Reading contained in Paul Tiessen's Apparently Incongruous Parts, there were 67 screenplays written for the filming of Lowry's Under The Volcano. One of those screenplays was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante worked with Joseph Losey on a film adaptation of Under The Volcano movie. I came across a page detailing his letters to Losey in the early 70's in Princeton University. You can read the background to the film script and Infante's intepretation of Under The Volcano in Guillermo Cabrera Infante By Raymond D. Souza.



Apparently, Infante took about 12 weeks to write the script, and near the end he began to go mad. He would, for instance, dress up in a tuxedo to go see his doctor. This sounds amusing, at least in retrospect, but the writer also became paranoid and delusional and finally lost consciousness totally. Electroconvulsant therapy was the prescribed remedy.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 – February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally "three sad tigers", but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses. Read more on Wikipedia

Here is a video about Infante:

Observations Under The Volcano

Director Christian Blackwood filmed this documentary of John Huston directing his actors and camera crew as he created the 1984 film version of Lowry's Under the Volcano.

Blackwood shows how scenes were developed, run through, and then completed -- and offers clips of the final product. He interviews people on the set about the history of the film and asks for their interpretations of characters or of other people or events connected with the shoot.

Top 10 List Of Films About Alcoholics

Check out List Verse's list of Top 10 movies about alcoholics which includes Huston's Under The Volcano:

Under the Volcano isn’t necessarily an amazing film, but Albert Finney’s subtle and scrupulous portrayal of alcoholic Geoffrey Firmin is unmatched in its ironically graceful stupor; is in itself is amazing. Against a background of war breaking out in Europe and the Mexican fiesta Day of Death, we are taken through one day in the life of the lead character Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The Consul’s self-destructive behavior is a source of perplexity and sadness to his nomadic, idealistic half-brother, Hugh, and his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage. It is based on the 1947 novel of the same name, which is a semi-autobiographical account the author, Malcolm Lowry’s, life.

Under The Volcano Movie Polish Poster 2

Another Polish poster for the movie

Polish Poster For Under The Volcano Movie

Taken from feature on 50 Incredible Film Posters from Poland

Under The Volcano Movie Original Screenplay

Universal, 1977 Original screenplay for the 1977 film version of Malcolm Lowry's classic novel, "Under the Volcano." This is the second draft by Ronald Harwood, based on the first draft written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Leduc. Near Fine in pink wrappers, mimeos, bound in black tape as issued. An overlooked film that does its titanic source material justice, and which earned Albert Finney an Oscar nomination for Best Actor

Buy it at Royal Books