When John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a script for the film 'Freud', he was confident he had 'the ideal man' for the job, but the enterprise turned out to be a disaster, writes Alan O'Riordan
DID YOU hear the one about the French philosopher and the Hollywood film-maker? It sounds like a bad joke, but some time in 1958 John Huston, then living in Co Galway, hit upon the idea of making a film about Sigmund Freud, and, having already directed Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exiton Broadway, he approached the Frenchman to write a script.
Sartre had, of course, no little talent for dramatic writing and he took to the task with gusto, no doubt impressed by the $25,000 fee. Huston's idea was to depart from the traditional biopic approach and instead make Freuda kind of intellectual detective story, following the hero down the back alleys of the unconscious to his theory of psychosexual development - a descent into the subconscious somewhat like Dante's into hell. Huston must have thought the man who wrote that hell was other people was top man for such a task, but in truth, Sartre would not strike one as the obvious choice. His ideas of man as free moral agent could not abide subconscious impulses.
Existentialism, at least in part, was, Sartre wrote, "a way of showing that a host of complex intentions that Freud places in the unconscious can be found in lived experience". Of course, that sounds like a much better film! Nonetheless, Huston trusted Sartre. Perhaps, from his American point of view, one European intellectual couldn't be a whole lot different to another. He was confident Sartre was "the ideal man" and that he had "read psychology deeply, knew Freud's work intimately and would have an objective approach". This, notably, is a confidence not shared in any way by Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre's biographer. But, true to his advice to Simone de Beauvoir - "we must try everything, we polymaths" - Sartre seemed happy to follow Huston's notion, and, after a slow start, worked through 1959 until the autumn, by which time he was ready to bring the fruits of his labours to Huston at St Clerans in Co Galway.
"Galway Existentialists" was the sub-headline in An Irishman's Diary in The Irish Times on September 29th, 1959, which told of how "over the past few days M Jean Paul Sartre and M John Huston have been putting their heads together at Huston's new place in Co Galway and putting the final polish on M Sartre's 400-page screen script for Huston's film on Freud". Proving that you should never believe all that you read in the papers, nothing could be further from the truth. There was a script long enough for a five-hour film, but polish, final or otherwise, did not feature on Sartre's faintly absurd and doomed trip to Galway, which was to be the nail in the coffin of his involvement in the picture.
The idea of a Paris flâneurtramping the bogs to the Irish outpost of a riding-and-shooting hearty such as Huston is the kind of irresistibly doomed enterprise that certain dramatists love - and so it proved to be. The two, prime examples of their types, managed to combine misunderstanding and mutual bafflement on a grand scale.
SARTRE'S FIRST LETTER back to Simone de Beauvoir in Paris hints at the privations of country life: "I'm going to send you a telegram . . . the bedroom phones don't work." At this point in the sojourn he is somewhat stoical - "I can't say I'm bored . . . it's worth living through this once" - and rather playfully casts himself in a Le Fanu-esque gothic situation, writing, "I haven't left this huge barracks of a place, though from my windows I can see vast green fields which . . . must stretch for miles and miles". And in these fields the homesick boulevardier sees "the master of the house" on horseback, "tearing by the house at a canter wearing a cap". A little donkey gamboled behind, "making a farce of the whole thing". The oddness of the house also discomfited the philosopher. Trinkets and mementos from Huston's travels cluttered every room: "authentic but uncongenial neighbours". In his room alone Sartre cites a wooden Christ from Mexico, Italian lamps, a Hindu Shiva, Japanese screens and a "real fake" Picasso, as well as "surely the world's ugliest Monet". There is very little of life here, Sartre concludes, "except for the house, which is expanding beneath our feet . . . a work in progress".
Ominously for their shared enterprise, Sartre's intellectual sympathies did not extend from the house to its owner. Their working relationship was a series of misunderstandings. While Huston admired Sartre's ability to make notes of his own words as he talked, he felt "there was no such thing as conversation with him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn't". This, together with the bafflement Sartre's rants in speedy French unfailingly induced, were evidence for the philosopher of Huston's supreme vacancy. "He settled not to contemplate the state of his soul in the Irish countryside but to evade taxes . . . He is literally incapable of talking to his guests," he complained, not realising that his host simply could not get a word in edgeways. The result of these daily conferences was always the same: everyone, even though all spoke French, "had a glazed look". "Sometimes," writes Huston in his autobiography, "I'd leave the room in desperation . . . When I'd return, he wouldn't have noticed that I'd been gone."
There was little personal warmth either. Sartre wrote of Huston's "infantile vanity" that made him don red dinner jackets and ride horses "not very well". Huston was equally complimentary of this "little barrel of a man . . . as ugly as a human being can be. His face was bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed."
Those very teeth led to a moment worthy of Woody Allen, when Sartre complained of a sore tooth. Huston, who for all his embracing of Ireland clearly could not give up that American fetish for dental hygiene, recommended a swift trip to civilisation, or Dublin at any rate. Sartre refused to go to any such lengths to save a mere tooth and headed to Galway, where Huston, tellingly, knew of no dentist. He emerged from the chair of a local dentist within minutes, the tooth pulled. This gave Huston the immortal reflection: "A tooth more or less made no difference in Sartre's cosmos" - perhaps existentialism has advantages.
THE IRISH LANDSCAPE did not, either, prompt tourist board-type prose from Sartre's letters. He found, to his credit, that there was no misery in the place - "simply poverty and above all death". Everywhere "stubborn little walls enclose plots of land . . . Everywhere you go, ruins, which range with no warning from the 6th century to the 20th . . . Only the presence of grass proves that an atom bomb wasn't dropped there . . . one step away from lunar, precisely the interior landscape of my boss, the great Huston."
Against all odds, the end of the Galway episode came with agreements on revision. But, when Sartre made them back in Paris, the script was even longer. Evidently, he saw "no reason why the film shouldn't be eight hours long". Eventually, it fell to Huston, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Charles Kaufman to cut, trim and synthesise the script. The process took six months. Afterwards, Huston sent the script - now a mere three hours - to Sartre in Rome. In what Huston describes as a "letter full of recriminations", he made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the film, and refused a credit and reputedly never saw it.
Sartre was by no means the final difficult collaborator on the Freud project. Huston went on to cast Montgomery Clift, by then severely the worse for drink and drugs, none of which stopped him from trying to rewrite his own scenes. So poor was Clift's memory for lines that Huston had to write them on labels and stick the labels on props and door frames for him to read, the knowledge of which ensures some scenes are difficult to watch with a straight face. Clift's talent does come through in the film, though. As Huston notes: "Monty's eyes light up . . . He looked like he were having a thought. He wasn't, Christ knows."
In the end, Huston got his intellectual suspense thriller, released in 1962. Freud: The Secret Passion, to give the full hysterical title, is a curiosity. Its focus, Freud's sexual theories, are by now his most exploded work. The film's concision uses all the familiar tropes of movie psychoanalysis: exaggerated neuroses, memories unearthed under hypnosis which, once known, become miraculous cures. Clift's Freud is himself an Oedipus, pursuing the truth that will curse him and, in his erroneous extrapolation of his own experience into a general theory quite without foundation, humanity. But, the speciousness or otherwise of Freud's so-called discoveries, and their usefulness as metaphors, is the kind of thing you'd need a fortnight in Galway to discuss.
