White Hunter, Black Heart
Director: Clint Eastwood
Year Released: 1990
Rating: 2.0
A fictitious version of John Huston (played by Eastwood himself) can't focus on filming his newest movie, The African Queen, without first killing an elephant on safari. The attempt to show Huston as an egomaniac is carefully off-set by several earlier scenes in which he (a.) defends the Jews (b.) defends the Africans and (c.) actually gets into a fight with a white waiter because of his treatment of an African waiter, which is supposed to allow for 'us' to sympathize at least partially with him so that later when he delays production and fights with his worrisome producer he doesn't come across as a complete ass (just a partial one). The elephant hunt itself is granted too much obvious symbolism: it could either represent Huston's ego, Hollywood, the mistreatment of Africans by the whites or whatever else you want it to mean (fill in the blanks!).
