Under the Volcano

John Huston had a great '80s, both in terms of the chronological decade and his eighth decade of life. It's impressive that the hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-for-some-to-get-along-with filmmaker lived as long as he did, but it's even more amazing that he was able to continue to work on (and finish!) so many films as he was slowly dying. He kicked off the decade with the psychological thriller Phobia, which no one has seen (though it is rentable on Prime), then made the bizarre but kind of amazing WWII POW-Camp/Sport movie Escape to Victory with Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow and football star Pelé in 1981, and in 1982 directed the most expensive Broadway musical adaptation to date, Annie, which was a monster hit and is quite a fun picture. With the box-office clout of Annie behind him, he set out to make this adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano with his Annie star, Albert Finney.

Like the book, the film takes place over a single day and night, 1938's Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Finney plays Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul to Mexico, who has fallen into alcoholism after the yearlong absence of his wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset). Despondent but still a gladhander, Firmin wanders the streets of the remote Mexican town in a drunken stupor, observing the festivities, engaging with locals and visiting dignitaries, reconnecting with his ex-wife and idealistic half-brother (Anthony Andrews), and ultimately crashing a Red Cross charity ball. He's a man who exists on the margins of society, whose self-destructive behavior can be read as a metaphor for civilization losing connection with the natural world during the onset of WWII.

As with most latter-day Huston productions, stories of the making of this picture are the stuff of legend that makes wannabe filmmakers like me long for an era in cinema that only really existed for a few eccentric directors. Despite the rather bleak nature of this movie, everyone had a ball making it. Also, like most Huston movies of this era, especially ones adapted from "unadaptable" works of literature—Reflections in a Golden Eye, Wise Blood, The Bible: In the Beginning…—it doesn't entirely work as a movie, but it's fascinating all the same. Finney gives a harrowing performance, truly like nothing captured on-screen before or since. This is not a movie about alcoholism as much as it's a character study about self-annihilation due to self-disgust.