White Hunter Black Heart

The egocentric, stubborn and grumpy Hollywood director John Wilson (Clint Eastwood) invites his friend Pete Verrill (Jeff Fahey) to write the screenplay of his next movie that will be a masterpiece in his opinion. He convinces the producer Paul Landers (George Dzundza) that the movie must be shot in Africa and they travel to the continent. Once in Africa, John becomes obsessed to hunt an specific elephant and neglects his cast and crew prioritizing the hunting with the native Kivu (Boy Mathias Chuma).

"White Hunter Black Heart" is an underrated fictional movie directed by Clint Eastwood. The character John Wilson is based on the director John Huston. Clint Eastwood has an amazing work performing a character with strong personality and stubbornness. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Coração de Caçador" ("Hunter Heart")

I must admit that Clint Eastwood was the main reason why I watched this movie. I'm already quite familiar with his work as an actor and as a director - even though I still haven't seen his biggest success "Million Dollar Baby" yet - and overall I can enjoy his work. Does that mean that I love all his movies? No, certainly not, but most of the time, he's the one who saves the movie, even when it isn't all that good. Knowing that he directed this movie and played a major role in it, only made it more interesting for me.

"White Hunter Black Heart" shows how the world famous movie director John Huston is planning on making a trip to Africa, where he will shoot his next movie. But despite his reputation of being a good director, he is also a very difficult man to work with. He doesn't want to make any concessions towards the producers and to make things worse he is also more interested in shooting the biggest elephant possible than shooting his movie and there is nothing or no-one who can bring him to other ideas...

Overall this is a good movie, although I must say that the beginning didn't do it for me. At first I had the feeling that the characters weren't all that real. They felt too much like caricatures, almost making this movie feel like a comedy, which it certainly isn't. That's also the reason why I wasn't exactly thinking about giving this movie a very high rating. But I always make that final decision at the end of the movie and I admit that the end of the movie was a lot better than the beginning. Not only was it very clear that John Wilson felt himself more at ease in Africa than in England, his reactions after the hunt also showed that this wasn't yet another typical type of quiet tough guy without any human emotions that Clint Eastwood plays so often. I really appreciated that in this movie. What I also liked was the entire 'behind the scenes of a classic movie' idea. OK, if you regularly buy a DVD, then you know from the extra's how a movie is shot. But that's how it is done today with all the modern techniques, camera's, lighting equipment. They didn't have all that in the fifties and it's nice to see how it was done back then.

Overall this is an enjoyable movie that offers some good acting and an interesting story. If the beginning had been more believable, this might well have become one of my all-time favorites. Now I give it a rating in between 7/10 and 7.5/10.

This film is billed as being 'loosely based' on an episode in the life of John Huston. 'Loosely based' is a misnomer as this film couldn't be about anything BUT John Huston, right down to Clint's attempt to imitate Huston's arch quasi-British-accented drawl. The episode is Huston's sojourn in Africa to direct a movie whose title is never mentioned in the film (the closest is when Clint-cum-Huston, asked the title, replies, "I don't know. The African something-or-other." A bit too coy). This pretense of not knowing the film wears thinner and thinner as we see the spitting image of the boat that was used in "The African Queen", and as two stars arrive who look and sound just like Kate Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (but are not so named in the film). The 'Bogart' character, on the first day of filming, even wears a costume exactly like that H.B. wore in the movie. This is a docudrama about the making of "The African Queen" that is pretending not to be a docudrama about the making of "The African Queen." What is it pretending to be? I don't really know, as it is just a disjointed series of episodes that show us - I guess - what a wild and crazy guy John Huston was. But he is not, at least in this movie, wild and crazy enough to sustain a whole movie. It has what appears to be intended as a 'tragic' ending, but it falls flat. There doesn't seem to be any point to the whole thing. Skip it. See "The African Queen" again instead.

Perhaps the greatest treat that can be found in Clint Eastwood's 1990 film "White Hunter Black Heart", a fictionalized account of the pre-production phase of the 1951 classic "The African Queen", is Eastwood's leading performance. His trademark acting style is usually stereotyped as the tough guy persona; he squints a lot and speaks only when he has to. An act of violence would usually suffice instead. But here we have Eastwood in rare form, showing us a side that we seldom see in his movies.

The film opens with a man riding quickly on horseback over a British estate, his face obscured by a riding helmet. We are given some brief narration by Pete Verrill (played by Jeff Fahey and based on screenwriter Peter Viertel), who is flying in to see this masked rider. Verrill is the extension of the audience; he is our eyes and ears as he works alongside Eastwood's character to develop the film that would be known as "The African Queen". Eastwood plays John Wilson, a thinly disguised version of iconic director/actor John Huston. Introducing his character on horseback is a way we've come to recognize Eastwood in films, but the way he acts for the rest of the picture is anything but what we would normally expect from him.

Wilson, despite staying at his friend's estate, is down and out and deeply in debt. Verrill is here to get the creative wheels flowing again, helping to finish the script for "The African Trader" (the name given to the film within the film), however Wilson only seems interested in going to Africa to hunt elephants; the picture is more of an afterthought. Viertel wrote the book this film was based on, which in turn was based on his experiences with Huston while making "The African Queen". Viertel also had a hand in the screenplay for this film.

Now that I've gotten some of the plot out of the way, let me get back to Eastwood's performance. He nails Huston's distinctive speech pattern and way of presenting himself. It is a rare sight to see Eastwood play such a flamboyant character, a suave and sophisticated gentleman who whips people into shape with long monologues and anecdotes instead of his fists, with one exception that also plays against audience expectations. I honestly can't think of another film where he has so much dialogue.

Despite this spectacular leading performance, the film is flawed by its overall ambition. It is as if Eastwood the director, after the acclaim of his previous biopic "Bird", had finally decided that he was an auteur. You have a film that wants to take on the creative process, a look behind the scenes, and show how one man's genius can be undermined by his selfishness and obsession. There is also some "Moby Dick" inspired stuff with the hunting of the elephant being about something more profound and enlightening. All of these themes don't exactly click together as they should, but the journey getting there is enough.

What you are left with is an underrated character study. As usual with his period pieces, the attention to detail of both time and place is exquisite. And like most of his films, the movie builds to a climactic showdown, with an ending and closing moment that are among the best of Eastwood's entire filmography.

One of Clint Eastwood's most unjustly-neglected movies... he directed and stars as a cranky, strong-willed movie director (he's actually playing the real-life John Huston, though his character is called "Wilson" in the movie... and the book it was based on). In Africa to direct an action-comedy ("The African Queen" in real life) Wilson throws the project into turmoil when he suddenly becomes obsessed with hunting and killing an elephant. "It's not a crime... it's bigger than that... it's a SIN," he says by way of justification. It takes a while to get used to Clint trying to play John Huston... trying to talk in a different style of voice than we're used to hearing... but the dialog and story are so compelling that you forget that Clint really is the wrong guy for this role. And yet, by the time the movie reaches it's devastating final line... Clint has made the character his own. As far as Clint's directing work goes... I would rank this film right after "Unforgiven"!