John Huston (1984)

John Huston’s Under the Volcano is a surprising entry in BFI’s ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ programme.  It didn’t mark Huston’s return to filmmaking after long absence from the Hollywood scene:  a confirmed genre-hopper, he’d directed a big-budget family musical – Annie – only two years previously.  It didn’t go unnoticed on original release, premiering at Cannes and earning two Oscar nominations.  It certainly didn’t mark the end of Huston’s career:  the two films he made subsequently – Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (released in late 1987, a few months after his death) – are widely admired.  Besides, this 1984 film is, in conception as well as in effect, a one-man show by the lead actor.  Adapted (by Guy Gallo) from Malcolm Lowry’s celebrated, partly autobiographical novel of the same name, Under the Volcano is remarkable much less for Huston’s signature than for Albert Finney’s performance.

Finney is Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul in Mexico and an alcoholic.  The film’s timeframe is around twenty-four hours – the last day of Geoffrey’s life, which coincides with the Day of the Dead festival in November 1938.  The setting is Cuernavaca, capital of the Mexican state of Morelos.  Under the Volcano was filmed on location there – the volcano of the title is Popocatépetl – and Huston makes the most of it.  The opening title sequence is intriguing:  a succession of death’s-head and other puppets appear on the screen, accompanied by Alex North’s tingly music.  As soon as the film proper gets underway, Huston’s camera is touring the town’s streets and market stalls – dominated by Day of the Dead outfits and artefacts that have less impact because they follow straight on from that title sequence.  While subsequent bits of local colour – street theatre, a bullfight – are visually striking, you almost start to wonder if their purpose in the film is to give Albert Finney, and the audience, occasional breaks from his herculean labours.

There are two main problems for Finney.  The first is that, although he’s given a great deal to say, his role is underwritten.  Malcolm Lowry regarded intoxication as an often gruelling but a visionary state of being.  In Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, his posthumously-published fictionalised autobiography, Lowry wrote that ‘not an hour, not a moment of my drunkenness, my continual death, was not worth it:  there is no dross of even the worst of those hours, not a drop of mescal that I have not turned into pure gold, not a drink I have not made sing’.  It seems Lowry saw Geoffrey Firmin’s alcoholism in terms similar to his own – but we don’t see or hear what’s going on inside Geoffrey’s head.  We’re merely in the almost constant company of a garrulous drunk.  It goes almost without saying that he becomes boring company.

Finney is inventive and funny whenever he has someone with theatrical flair enough to spark with.  That’s clear from his single scenes with Katy Jurado, as Señora Grigorio, a bar owner and fortune-teller; and, especially, James Villiers, as an Englishman who stops his car just in time to avoid driving into Geoffrey, who’s lying face down in the road at the time.  Geoffrey picks himself up, dusts himself down and cheerfully insists that he’s fine.  The other Englishman spouts well-meaning, what-ho inanities even as Geoffrey heads off unsteadily down the road:  in response to these, Finney’s assenting murmurs and gestures are a fine blend of sociability and sarcasm.  Geoffrey has rather more screen time with a local physician, Dr Vigil (Ignacio López Tarso), at least some of which works well.  After Geoffrey laments how much he misses his wife Yvonne, from whom he’s recently divorced, Dr Vigil takes him to a church, urging Geoffrey to pray to a statue of the Virgin Mary for Yvonne to come back.  ‘I can’t,’ protests Geoffrey, with an appalled glance at Mary’s unappealing plaster features, ‘It’s like asking my fairy godmother for three wishes’.  The following morning, Yvonne returns to Cuernavaca:  ‘A miracle!’, Dr Vigil declares, on being introduced to her.  But Yvonne’s arrival is where the second problem for Albert Finney – the casting of the two key supporting roles – starts to kick in.

Finney expertly suggests that Geoffrey, however boisterous and chatty, isn’t fully present in his interactions with most people – the effects of alcohol somehow close him off.  His now ex-wife, whom Geoffrey still loves, is an exception yet Jacqueline Bisset, who plays her, is impersonal.  This is intriguing for a while; once it emerges that Yvonne is still in love with Geoffrey too, despite his chronic drinking and his impotence, Bisset’s cautious, arm’s-length manner makes less and less sense.  The lack of connection between Finney and her, rather than illustrating the Firmins’ relationship, only exposes Bisset as an underpowered actress.  The fact that Yvonne is also an actress but not a greatly successful one, is hardly an excuse.

Still, Jacqueline Bisset is considerably better than Anthony Andrews, seen here during his deservedly brief big-time cinema career in the wake of Granada TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981).  Journalist Hugh, just back from the Spanish Civil War, seems meant to be restless, impassioned and left-wing – during an outdoor lunch with Geoffrey and Yvonne, he shows how impulsive and hot-blooded he is by jumping into a bull ring and doing muleta business with a bull.  Hugh’s also supposed to have had an affair with Yvonne at some point.  You don’t believe any of these things.  Looking coiffed (1980s style) and cas in his cowboy jeans and boots, Andrews’ facial expressions alternate between smugly quizzical and, when Hugh gets serious, petulant.  He has next to no characterisation.  With Bisset and Andrews to play off, Albert Finney must have decided, reasonably enough, that he needed to do enough acting for three and John Huston lets him.

Huston has occasional fun joshing supernatural assumptions:  after Geoffrey gets a result from not praying to the Holy Mother for Yvonne’s return comes Señora Gregorio’s prediction that ‘One day she may come back to you’.  Señora Gregorio is so used to the routine of prophecy that she’s oblivious to Geoffrey’s information that Yvonne already has come back – indeed, at that very moment is standing in the street opposite the Señora’s bar.  The film’s climax takes place in and around a bordello, where Geoffrey will meet his violent death and Huston conveys something of his disgusted fascination with the grotesquely aberrant.  His equation of repellent appearance and moral deformity is out of date now, though:  the parade of dwarves, transvestites and overweight, greasy Mexicans in the bordello is less a freak show than a display of political incorrectness.  Otherwise, Huston’s direction is unusually self-effacing.  After that promising start under the titles, Alex North’s score gets more conventional and less individual, too.

21 April 2025