Under the Volcano (Conacito Uno, Ithaca, Universal, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:15, as part of a Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Jacqueline Bisset, I watched a screening of John Huston’s 1984 film of Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry was a writer who enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1970’s, possibly because that was the time the first major biography of him was published, and he lived his entire adult life in a state of alcoholic stupor from which he only occasionally arose to write. Lowry’s Wikipedia page attributes his lifelong melancholy to an incident in college at St. Catharine’s in Cambridge in which his roommate, Paul Fitte, was a Gay man who made a pass at Lowry. When Lowry turned him down, Fitte committed suicide, and years later Lowry published a story with the poignant title “Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid.” His first wife, Jan Gabriel, said years after their marriage had ended that the reasons she left him were his drinking and the constant attention he was getting from Gay men interested in him. In his early years he signed on as a sailor on a private vessel, and the experience formed the basis for his first novel, Ultramarine, written while he was still an undergraduate.

In 1936, in a last-ditch attempt to make his marriage work, he moved to Mexico, arriving in Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead in 1936. Within two years he’d been deported from Mexico for his alcoholism and the public disturbances he created “under the influence,” and he settled in Los Angeles. While there he began a long-term relationship with another woman, Margerie Bonner, an actress and writer who later became his second wife. He also worked on Under the Volcano, a largely autobiographical novel based on his experiences in Mexico and which he had actually started writing there. When Lowry left again for Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he left the unfinished manuscript behind. Margerie joined him in Vancoiver and brought Under the Volcano with her, and it was finally published in 1947. Today it’s considered one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and it’s been reprinted in various althonogies, but when I tried reading it in 1975 – at a particularly low point in my own life – I literally could not get through it. I put it aside midway through – something I almost never do with a book – because the story was so relentlessly downbeat and despairing I feared that if I kept reading it, the author would convince me to commit suicide.

This was almost a decade before Under the Volcano was filmed by director John Huston – no stranger either to obsessive quests (many of his movies concern a small group of characters after some hidden treasure who get undone by their own human frailties) or to drinking. Under the Volcano had gained the reputation as an “unfilmable” book because of its dense imagery and symbolism, though movies figure prominently in the plot: one character in the novel is an expatriate French film director (though Huston and his writer, Guy Gallo, left him out of the film) and the cheap, sleazy movie theatre in Cuernavaca is showing the 1935 film Mad Love, based on a story called The Hands of Orlac that was done as a silent film and remade in the U.S. in 1935 with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive, directed by Karl Freund. The Mexican release of Mad Love reverted to the story’s original title and called it Los Manos de Orlac, and its story – about a concert pianist (Clive) who loses his hands in an accident, and a super-surgeon (Lorre) who grafts new hands but doesn’t tell him the hands come from a serial killer named Orlac who was executed for his crimes, but the hands might be tempted to kill again … – is obviously an appropriate choice for a film set in the Hallowe’en season.

The central character is Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney), who despite his different career trajectory – he’s the former British consul to Cuernavaca rather than an aspiring writer – he’s basically a fictional stand-in for Lowry himself. The other major characters are Firmin’s American-born actress ex-wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset, turning in a surprisingly accomplished performance, especially from someone who basically became a star through her big tits, teasingly encased in a wet white T-shirt, in the film The Deep) and his half-brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews). All three of these characters drink – they even go out on drinking binges with Geoffrey, which seems to me about the worst thing you can do with an active alcoholic, especially one you’re trying to sober up with as part of an attempt at a reconciliation. The story starts in Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead – November 1, 1938 – and the spectre of World War II haunts the story, especially when Hugh points out a fellow traveler on the bus they take from Cuernavaca to the Mexican countryside and notices the badge that identifies him as a Sinarquista, a member of a group of Mexican fascists that were secretly being funded by Nazi Germany.

Other than that, though, it’s just a series of increasingly depressing incidents as Geoffrey Firmin falls farther and farther off the wagon, and ends up disgustingly drunk and ultimately dead. Significantly, at the beginning of the film he’s drawing enough of a line in his alcohol consumption that he announces he won’t drink mescal, a particularly strong (verging on lethal) Mexican liqueur; by the end of the film, trapped inside a Mexican whorehouse with the bizarre name “El Amor de los Amores,” he orders mescal. He also ends up in one of the rooms of the brothel being orally serviced by a Mexican hooker, and of course while this is going on (and Geoffrey is shown as too drunk either to resist or consent) Yvonne and Hugh arrive and she catches him with the whore,while just about every Mexican in the bar claims that Geoffrey owes them money for the truck. What was surprising to me is that Yvonne Firmin doesn’t make it to the end of the film alive, either; at the end both Geoffrey and Yvonne run afoul of some creepy and corrupt local Mexican politicians and get themselves assassinated (though in the book she actually dies before he does), and the final scene of the film is Hugh, who apparently had an unrequited crush on Yvonne, cradling her body as she expires.

Watching Under the Volcano was like watching a slow-motion train wreck – all too much of it brought back my own memories of being very much in love with an active alcoholic and realizing how helpless I was in the face of his addiction – and the only even halfway likable character in the film is Hugh, who at least has tried to do something meaningful with his life. He’s worked as a reporter and as such he covered the Spanish civil war and the fall of Madrid, the last city to hold out for the Loyalists against Franco’s fascist Phalange,and at one point, in one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, he borrows a guitar from a Mexican musician working the tables at the outdoor bar and sings one of the songs about the resistance. (Remember Tom Lehrer’s line: “Remember the war against Franco/That’s the kind where each of us belongs/Though he may have won all the battles/We had all the good songs.” Even more than with The Mighty Quinn, Under the Volcano had the feeling of a film made during the wrong decade. Had John Huston been able to make it during the decade between the novel’s publication and the death of his greatest star, Humphrey Bogart, Under the Volcano might have been a masterpiece; Bogart’s multidimensionality and demonstrated ability to play a piece of human flotsam (as he had done so brilliantly under Huston’s direction in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made in 1948 and also set and largely shot in Mexico; according to its credits, Under the Volcano was entirely shot in Mexico, in the state of Morelos where the story takes place) while still keeping him interesting would have brought Geoffrey Firmin vividly to life.

Another actor who would have been good for it was Richard Burton in his prime, which he was well beyond by the time Under the Volcano was filmed (he died August 9, 1984), but his own well-known fondness for the bottle and his previous success playing a burned-out alcoholic under Huston’s direction in The Night of the Iguana (1963, and also set in Mexico!) would have suited the role. In fact, it turns out Burton actually read excerpts from Under the Volcano for a 1976 Canadian documentary on Lowry’s life. Instead Huston ended up with Albert Finney, whose idea of playing the on-his-last-legs drunk was to alternately mumble and bellow all his lines; Finney won an Academy Award nomination for this film, but sometimes all you need to do to get an Oscar nomination is to leave no stick of scenery unchewed, and whatever the limitations of his performance, Finney definitely accomplished that. (I’m still angry that Al Pacino finally won his long-deserved Academy Award for one of his worst movies, Scent of a Woman, after being passed over for all his great ones, including the first two Godfathers, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.) Maybe a better movie is lurking within the nether regions of Under the Volcano – or maybe Lowry’s novel is itself overrated, a piece of self-justification from a hopeless alcoholic who seems to have drunk his way out of a major literary career. (F. Scott Fitzgerald was also an alcoholic, but at least he wrote some truly great novels along the way!)