[One] of the most fashionable blood-sports seems to be baiting John Huston. The fury of disciples suddenly recognising false idols is not a pretty one…. [Because] Adrian Messenger and The Secret Passion [released in the United States as Freud] are bad films … then it also follows that The Maltese Falcon must have been a bad film. This is one of the sillier aspects of the 'Cahiers' school of criticism, which has spread to its British and American hangers on. Well, Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, Sierra Madre, still look pretty good. Huston's decline seems to date from his decision to enter the characterless international cinema with African Queen, which still looks pretty bad.
His films, as his more vituperative critics now claim, may always have been static, but the eloquence of his groupings and the precision and control with which his tableaux melted into each other stamp his early Americana (with the exception of Across the Pacific, but including In This Our Life) with a very definite Huston style. What happened to the style is anyone's guess, it was intermittently visible in The Unforgiven (the man-hunt in the dust storm) and The Misfits (the mustang hunt) but in [Adrian Messenger and The Secret Passion] it has been reduced to self caricature. Adrian Messenger had to coast along on its gimmick, and … The Secret Passion is packed with bewigged and bewhiskered actors who seem, at any moment, about to peel off their make-up just to show the disguise is only skin-deep.
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