1990 Directed by Clint Eastwood
Renowned filmmaker John Wilson travels to Africa to direct a new movie, but constantly leaves to hunt elephants and other game, to the dismay of his cast and crew. He eventually becomes obsessed with hunting down and killing one specific elephant.
Bub Asman David M. Horton Virginia Cook-McGowan Alan Robert Murray Marshall Winn Jayme S. Parker Les Fresholtz Robert G. Henderson Michael Jiron Joseph A. Ippolito Vern Poore
Cazador blanco, corazón negro, Caçador blanc, cor negre, Chasseur blanc, coeur noir, Hvid jæger, sort hjerte, Coração de Caçador, Белият ловец, Черното сърце, Caçador Branco, Coração Negro
On dreaming and acting power fantasies. As much about Eastwood himself as it is about Huston. A treatise on how power works and how fiction, literary and film, help advance them. It is the Hemingway ideal on trial with an amount of feeling no like-bait twitter performance will ever come close to achieve. Eastwood as Huston is the high point of his career as an actor. probably because it is a series of insider annotations that never allows any distance (that he is acting opposite to Jeff Fahey, a fine B -movie actor giving a very workman-like non-performance adds to context). It is all about imposing will, shooting an elephant, making a movie, winning an argument, acting like you care…
"I've done a lot of hustling in my time, a lot more than I'd like to admit to."
Maybe the single least commercial movie Eastwood ever directed. There are lots of movies which give us the idealized artist, and its shadow, the self-destructive one. But rarely do we get the irresponsible, egotistical, megalomaniac. Though Eastwood spends much of his early career toying with his iconography, this film alongside Unforgiven and Bridges of Madison County could possibly constitute a sort of self-reflexive trilogy, here the myth of the director-artist, Unforgiven being Eastwood the Icon, while Bridges with Eastwood, the man himself. In my opinion, Eastwood is more "self-image,"conscious than perhaps any other actor-director in history, and here he is tackling the…
85
White Hunter, Black Heart is difficult on multiple levels. For one, it's a film about performance, as we see Clint Eastwood playing a thinly veiled caricature of John Huston in the process of making The African Queen. His self-destructive ego is at odds with the respect for the culture he's exploiting. A terrific role that is revealing for both Huston and Eastwood himself. It's also a film about the Hollywood machine as a mass-entity. How major directors, under the guise of creating art, will go to great lengths to achieve their vision, no matter the consequences. And it's also a film that goes beyond the film industry to comment on colonization, racism, and anti-Semitism - that these productions are aware of their own hatred and destruction, yet they choose to say "action" anyway. No wonder this flopped, it's harsh and brutal in ways that even the most hardened Eastwood works are not. But it sure leaves an impression.
“White Hunter Black Heart” is a Brechtian work of meta cinema by Clint Eastwood that sees him shooting down Old Hollywood and colonialism with one bullet.
“Hunter” is based on a novel of the same name by Peter Viertel. The book is a thinly veiled account of screenwriter Viertel’s own experiences on the location shoot of John Huston’s “The African Queen.”
Eastwood himself steps into the part of the Huston-esque character of the film. There’s a witty personal irony about the always ahead of schedule and under budget director Eastwood playing Huston; who likely blew as much as Eastwood spends on an entire film on his whiskey and cigar fund alone.
Beginning the film shoot in “Hunter” takes on the…
Macho stoicism, nature and its unforgiving force, indifferent to our courage and passion, our arrogance and self-righteousness, Huston and Eastwood personas intertwining in a final despairing note of hope, a man understanding that there is something bigger than himself out there but losing too much in the process, abandoning his witty rhetoric and elegant irony for a simple 'action', a monumental parade of gestures and rhythm that understands the cosmological weight of a sin - perhaps that's what love is.
Ranks with Josey Wales and A Perfect World as Eastwood's finest offering. Nearly all of his 2000s work has been about the undermining both of his own image and American iconography of masculinity as a whole, but White Hunter, Black Heart got there first and did so with a hell of a lot more subtlety than some of the terribly penned, on-the-nose features that have defined his overrated work of late. But the way he draws the audience here into both rooting for and, ultimately, despising his John Huston stand-in reverberates with autocritique and the demolition of his hero's pedestals. A masterpiece.
Clint Eastwood A Retrospective - Week 35
Hard-living, macho movie director John Wilson (Clint Eastwood) arrives in 1950s Zimbabwe to prepare for his next film. Accompanied by screenwriter Pete Verrill (Jeff Fahey), Wilson becomes far more interested in shooting an elephant than getting ready for the shoot. Determined, Wilson moves production to a village where a native hunter helps him in his quest. Obsessed with this goal even as filming grows ever more chaotic, the director begins to question the ethics and origins of his fixation.
A change of pace for Eastwood here that unsurprisingly tanked at the box office and was considered a flop. It’s a thinly veiled portrait of director John Huston's making of The African Queen, he…
At the heart of darkness, cinema fighting itself. One of the most interesting movies Mr. Eastwood ever made mainly because it's also his least commercial and therefore anti-spectacle: in which white/macho arrogance is deconstructed and the barbarism of the west's civilization and its colonialist history is exposed. More Brechtian than Brecht. Really need to watch this again before I can write anything, but this one is a really dense work. Clint here walks into levels of profound acting than only Monty Clift in his Misfits era had charted. Another unhinged banger by sick genius Clint Eastwood...
A director fixated on hunting rather than filmmaking is akin to a President who opts to golf rather than work: The only difference is that John Huston was a Democrat.
The names are changed but this is Clint Eastwood's shot at filming the story behind the making of 'The African Queen' or rather the lead up to starting the film when John Huston was more interested in shooting an elephant than shooting the picture. This was a passion project for Eastwood, who directs and plays the Huston character.
He has fun trying to get Huston's drawl right but the film is solid rather than spectacular and doesn't benefit from the writer, Peter Viertel, making his own character the most righteous.
Several British character actors get to share quite a bit of screen time with Mr Eastwood, and there are some stunning images shot in Zimbabwe.
Katharine Hepburn apparently contested the accuracy of this movie, which was one of Clint's worst performing at the box office.
