Under the Volcano

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Under the Volcano an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s literary masterpiece, directed by John Huston in 1984.

The story centers on an alcoholic ex-British Consul (Albert Finney) in Cuernavaca Mexico on the Day of the Dead in 1938. He drinks constantly in amazing, staggering amounts. His wife (ex-wife, actually) Yvonne (Jacqueline Bissett) comes back to him, trying to make another go of their marriage, but the Consul can’t forget or forgive her for having slept with his half-brother (Anthony Andrews). And so his life ends, under the volcanoes that loom above the countryside as a malevolent symbol.

Long ago, I believe before this movie was made, I watched a documentary on Lowry and his life and the creation of this book, liberally interspersed with passages read from the book and images of Mexico. This absolutely staggered me and I always wanted to read the book and yet never did … the prospect of hundreds of pages of drunken misery seemed too depressing to me. When the movie came out, I knew it could never match the documentary, so I never watched it, though I was curious about it. Finally, at last, I have.

Here’s an odd coincidence: the DP was Gabriel Figueroa, who may be the same guy (same name, anyway) as the DP on The Young One which was made 25 years earlier! I thought the colors were perhaps too bright, not stylized enough. (Another minor quibble: Finney and Andrews and most of the men in the cast sported hair lengths more suited for the 80s than the 30s.)

It seems at first to be minor Huston in the beginning, but the climax, in which some fascists pick on the Consul for no particular reason, and then shoot him like a dog in the mud in the rain outside the lowest, filthiest cantina and whorehouse in the district, is chilling and very powerful.

Finney gives a fine performance, but Bissett was a revelation to me – never have I seen her give so rich and emotionally deep a performance as this one. I remember her debut in Hollywood in the late 1960s, in Bullitt and some Frank Sinatra private eye film, and a surfer movie, when she was just a model, really. Here some 20 years later she has the chops and world experience to really bring it.

I suspect that Huston and the screenwriters only loosely based this on the book, for there is a strong theme of the approaching war, that I don’t remember from the documentary. For example, in an early scene, the Consul makes quite a scene at a formal event for the Red Cross by insulting the German ambassador, then ranting and raving about the Mexican custom of requiring the dead to be transported by express train only, accompanied by a relative with a first-class ticket; the Consul works this up into trains stuffed and packed with the dead, packed upright, or chopped up and stuffed into bags to make room for them all. Of course there would come death trains that went to the concentration camps in a few years in Eastern Europe.

Huston lived in Mexico in the 1930s, he lived there on and off for other periods of his life, and shot many movies there. Some of this movie might come as much from his memories of the place as the book. It might even be true that Huston met Lowry at the time, I don’t know.

I wish I could see the documentary again. This movie was good, very good … the documentary still overpowers it in my memory.

(6 April 2009)