Director: John Huston

John Huston directed for nearly fifty years and acted memorably in other people’s films, most notably as Noah Cross in Chinatown. He began by adapting The Maltese Falcon almost verbatim from Hammett, a first feature that effectively invented the American detective film as a visual form.

His subject was men undone by what they want. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The Man Who Would Be King and The African Queen all follow people who get close to the prize and are ruined in proportion to how close they got. His father Walter won an Oscar for Sierra Madre in the same year John won for directing it.

He worked until the end, directing The Dead from a wheelchair while on oxygen, which is the film most of his admirers name first.