MEXICO: HUSTON, EISENSTEIN, BUÑUEL

I was on the way to the biblioteca to return a book when I stopped at a health food store for a liquado. There I fell into conversation with a white-bearded, ruddy-faced American named Tom Shaw - John Huston's assistant director, it turned out, there to set up locations for a film in Pozos, a nearby abandoned mining town. By then, Huston was elderly and quite ill, his emphysema preventing him from making the trip up into the thin mountain air from Las Calecas, his home south of Puerto Vallarta. (It would turn out to prevent him from making the film there at all.) We adjourned to the jardin, the central plaza, where Shaw - echoing Humphrey Bogart in the famous lottery ticket scene of Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - stopped for a shoeshine. We talked for a while longer.

I knew Huston had been in and out of Mexico since the making of The Night of the Iguana in 1964, and that he had shot Under the Volcano in Cuernavaca some years ago. In fact, the book I was returning to the library that morning was a collection of short stories by B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which Huston had filmed in Mexico in 1948. But I had no idea of the extent of the director’s involvement with the country, which spanned six decades and existed on many levels besides the films he made here.

In 1925 Huston, then 19, arrived in post- revolutionary Veracruz on board a ship called the American Banker. There were buzzards in the streets, beggars everywhere, and the road to Mexico City was thick with bandidos. In Mexico City he befriended bullfighters, rode with Mexican horsemen, spent time in jail, accepted an honorary commission in the Mexican army, and was challenged to a gunfight. Back in California, when a woman turned down his proposal of marriage, he sailed to Acapulco by boat, then undertook a 17-day mule trek back to Mexico City. Eventually he returned to LA and married the woman, Dorothy Harvey. At various times he invested in a gold mine, a silver mine, and a hotel. He adopted a Mexican boy. Through the years he was friends with Mexican presidents, revolutionaries, filmmakers, bullfighters and artists.

In 1940 Huston began a correspondence with a reclusive writer living in San Cristóbal De Las Casas in southern Mexico. Eight years would pass before he’d shoot The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the mountains of Michoacan with Humphrey Bogart, the director's father, Walter - and the strange, secretive author in attendance, incognito, as his own agent, Hal Croves. (The identity of B. Traven remained a subject of heated speculation for decades: Was he a German anarchist named Ret Marut? The illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm? Hal Croves from Chicago, whom he sometimes impersonated? Meanwhile, his books and short stories became part of the Mexican school curriculum.)

Huston returned to Mexico in 1959 to shoot a Western in Durango, The Unforgiven, with a large, expensive cast that included Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy and Lillian Gish. During delays in filming, Huston and some buddies flew in a small plane into eastern Veracruz State to rendezvous with temple robbers selling off priceless early Olmec artifacts. Huston smuggled some very large pieces into the States then to his home in Ireland. In the end, The Unforgiven sank of its own weight.

Fifteen years later, Huston, Elisabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, and much of the world’s press corps descended upon the small coastal village of Puerto Vallarta, where Huston was turning Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana into a film. The media attention and simmering intrigues among the cast - in the midst of which a fall from a collapsed balcony broke Tom Shaw's back - put slumbering, steamy Puerto Vallarta on the international map.

From then on, Huston worked and desported at Las Calacas, his Mexican home, among family, lovers, animals, visitors, and colleagues. In 1984, he shot what would be his last Mexico film, Under the Volcano, from Malcolm Lowry's novel, with Albert Finney playing the drunken, raging consul.

In the jardin that day, while Tom Shaw got his shoes shined, we started talking about the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican film, Qué Viva México. I hadn't known it existed until a few weeks earlier when I'd seen a video version at a friend’s house.

Eisenstein had been invited to Hollywood to work in the late 1920s - a fiasco, as it would turn out to be for so many foreign directors. The creator of Battleship Potemkin couldn't possibly be contained within the American filmmaking paradigm. In 1930, taking up an invitation Diego Rivera had extended when they’d met in Moscow, Eisenstein crossed into Mexico. Deeply inspired by what he found here, he began making a film on the country, with backing provided by the well-heeled brother of the muckraking US journalist Upton Sinclair. Organized as a series of vignettes, the film included stunning Mayan sequences shot at Yucatan's Chichén Itzá; staged battles of the Mexican Revolution, replete with trains and bullets and hordes of costumed extras; and a wedding ceremony among the people of Tehuantepec (whose extravagant headpieces and dresses Frida Kahlo would wear and champion). Before Eisenstein could complete his film, Stalin summoned him back to Moscow. To refuse would have been, literally, fatal. The footage lay unseen for decades in Moscow's film archives until Eisenstein’s longtime Russian cinematographer assembled, edited, and released it under the title Qué Viva México.

Tom Shaw was on his way to Marfil, an old bohemian suburb of Guanajuato, to have dinner with a blacklisted screenwriter friend of his and Huston who had lived there since the 1950s. Mexico had welcomed so many exiles, immigrants, expatriates, and simply weary travelers over the years. Among them was the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel.

I seldom get on a bus in Mexico without recalling Buñuel’s film, shot in Mexico in 1951, in the lawless western mountains of Guerrero. Mexican Bus Ride (Subida al Cielo), probably the Spanish director’s best loved film, follows the story of a village boy who, when his mother takes ill, boards a bus in search of a doctor. An epic adventure ensues, embroiling the boy and the other passengers in a series of riotous mishaps and revelations.

Buñuel had arrived in Mexico in 1946, joining the exodus from Spain in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's takeover. He lived and worked here for 36 years, eventually becoming a Mexican citizen. As a university student in Madrid, Buñuel had roomed with Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí, then in Paris moved quickly to the center of the Surrealist movement; his scandalous Un Chien Andalou, made with Dalí, was the first great Surrealist film. While Eisenstein was filming at Paris’ Billancourt Studio, Buñuel was on the next set making the shocking L’Age d’Or, whose erotic violations caused such an uproar it was closed down after a week and wasn't exhibited in Paris again for fifty years.

In 1930, Buñuel found himself in Hollywood drinking around Charlie Chaplin’s pool with Eisenstein, who was soon to leave for Mexico. Hollywood didn't go any better for Buñuel, and before long he returned to Europe. He was working for the Spanish Embassy in Paris when Dalí introduced him to the wealthy British Surrealist, aesthete, and Mexico dweller Edward James, who, eager to support the Spanish Republican cause, offered to buy them a huge bomber.

Buñuel spent the war years in New York, hired by Nelson Rockefeller (whose family would commission, then destroy, Diego Rivera's Leninist mural at Rockefeller Center) to work at the Museum of Modern Art. Back in Hollywood at war's end, Buñuel again had little luck and headed for Mexico. Here he made dozens of films, working on 24-day shooting schedules, editing in three or four days. His 1951 realist film, Los Olvidados, about Mexico City street urchins, outraged much of Mexico but earned him a Best Director award at Cannes.

Buñuel liked to write his screenplays at San Jose Purua, the hotel and thermal spa in the mountains of Michoacan where John Huston and his cast and crew had stayed while making The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Buñuel and Huston often used the same Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, whose stark, sumptuous black and white images burned Mexico into the foreign imagination. Even after he was able to return to Europe and make Viridiana, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel’s home remained Mexico.

Everybody knew everybody in Mexico back then, it seemed. Buñuel and Trotsky, whom the artist Siquieros tried to assassinate. Sergei and Huston, Diego and Frida, Edward James, who seemed to know everybody. The painter Remedios Varo and her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. Raul Helmer, the gringo jarocho, Che and Fidel - even Lee Harvey Oswald. All interconnected, their histories overlapping. The world seemed smaller then, once upon a time in Mexico.