John Huston walks into a bar.

I have a vision from my youth of my grandmother's mother on a bed in a back room located somewhere in downtown Dayton. My great grandmother: immobile and moribund, pallid and silent, oblivious to my visit. It's no joke that Pet Cemetery was a horrifying film for me at that age, because I knew exactly what it was to have death's presence fill a room. And that was my central image of elderly living for a long time.

I think it'll be a goddamn miracle if I live into my 90s, 80s, 70s, or even 60s. I come from a cursed family, a cancerous family; bad luck and bad genes. Because there are real living people making these films I watch, and because I can learn about them, it matters to me that John Huston was 77 while filming Under the Volcano. It matters to me that he would die three years later. It even sort of matters that his previous film was 1982's Annie, a bizarre collision of tones that isn't overpowering.

I watched three late-Huston films recently: 1984's Under the Volcano, 1979's Wise Blood, and 1972's Fat City. The three of them weren't good by an old man's standards, the three of them were great period. Especially Under the Volcano and Fat City. Real quick some auxiliary talent contributing to these films: Fat City was shot by Conrad Hall, Richard Sylbert was the production designer, and the film stars Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell, and Candy Clark; Under the Volcano is an adaptation of the Malcolm Lowry novel, was shot by Gabriel Figueroa, the production designer was Gunther Gerzo, and the film stars Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, and Anthony Andrews. Smart choices for both films. John Huston, a relic of the studio system, continued to make brilliant cast and crew selections, selecting not only talented people, but talented people whose specific qualities blended with the tone of the script and film. However much I enjoyed Under the Volcano, part of that enjoyment came from knowing it was Gabriel Figueroa behind the camera, someone I could think of as a legitimate tour guide into the bowels of Mexico (Huston too, definitely Huston too, who spent a great deal of time in Mexico).

Not only did he make great films late into his career, but these films are also virile, vibrant, and evocative. Stephanie would have liked a single happy ending between the three, but Huston was completely in step with his contemporary times, and downbeat endings were a prevalent feature of films from the period. They the three films are populated by anti-heroes thrust into morally ambiguous worlds without proper means for coping, and could be played favorably next to any Altman, Ashby, or Rafelson whathaveyou, Cutter's Way, etc. Huston's characters roam their narratives like cattle on the free range, and if there's a criticism I have it's that they have too little definition, especially in Wise Blood, which is why I don't think it's a truly great one.

Fat City is an episodic, backwards journey into semi-professional boxing in a 1970's city. It opens with half-retired professional boxer Stacy Keach entering a gym where a casual, spare-time boxer, the young Jeff Bridges, is working out. They engage in a spar and Keach compliments Bridges, telling him he's a natural athlete with a god-given talent. And in many ways this way will be the high point in a film that shimmers with the pains and joys of always being a contender, never a champion. The film is like if Rocky had started in the middle and spiraled inward to the beginning, and the end of Fat City is a direct parallel to the beginning of Fat City. The narrative has a double meaning ring structure: the ring of events as a symbol of the fighting arena, and the ring of events as a symbol of the human condition.

Under the Volcano is a darkly humorous and richly layered film that is undoubtedly the work of a mature filmmaker. In some ways it's the Key Largo I always wanted to see, and Albert Finney is the same kind of hard to like and hard to hate and probably impotent protagonist Bogart was in Key Largo, but Finney's character is not confined to the rigor of plot and decency Bogart's earlier film (with Huston) was. Huston and his crew match the inner drama of Finney's character with violent and macabre images of Mexico city. The opening is a stroll through a town on the Day of the Dead. Death haunts the picture, haunts Finney. Stand out scenes are Finney's entry into the church with his friend, to pray to the Madonna for his wife's return, the bull fight sequence, and the incredible final moments that are thoroughly sad, utterly miserable, and completely sick. In those final moments there's both the sense of the impending doom and the sense of completion, and I would say it's too precise an ending for a film that's been to this point unbound and spiritual. It feels a bit 'and the moral of the story is.' This forwardness is redeemed by Huston's skill as a filmmaker. What could feel too overdone plays out at a perfect pitch, and that's why the ending works when it shouldn't.