The second protagonist is Mexico itself. Lowry’s volcanoes rise to heaven; the barranca lies behind the villas and cantinas, winding through Quahnahuac, choked with the rotting garbage of history. On the Day of the Dead, the Consul is faced with a fearful choice: escape to heaven or descent into hell, and he lives his last hours in a private purgatory. Mexico is a perfect setting for such a drama. And almost no foreigners have evoked that country with such chilling accuracy as Lowry. He and the Consul traverse the cruel landscape together, and then abruptly face the abyss.
All of this is told in a way that has always attracted movie people. In fact, Lowry himself longed to write the screen version of his own novel. Frank Taylor, a friend who went to work for MGM in 1949, told Lowry he was working on a film of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Lowry, perhaps thinking a successful production of Fitzgerald’s novel would lead to an MGM commission for Under the Volcano, bestowed on Taylor an unsolicited script of Tender Is the Night. It was about five hundred pages long, and Taylor described it in 1964 as “a total filmic evocation — complete with critical remarks, attached film theory, directions to actors, fashions, automobiles: The only things like it are the James Agee scripts.” Neither project happened.
In 1962, the actor Zachary Scott optioned Under the Volcano, but couldn’t get it made, and after his death in 1965, his widow sold the rights to the Hakim brothers (Robert, Raymond, and Andre), who wanted Luis Buñuel to direct. This began a long, tangled story of hirings and firings, scripts and revisions and announcements of productions that never materialized. Buñuel gave way to Jules Dassin, who, in turn, was replaced by Joseph Losey. The Hakims’ option lapsed; they sued the Lowry estate and lost. Then one Luis Barranco acquired the rights. More scripts. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez took a crack at a treatment, as did Carlos Fuentes; directors Ken Russell and Jerzy Skolimowski were involved at other points. When the professionals failed, amateurs tried: Students read the novel and wrote adaptations: cultists, kabalists, professors, actors, all tried to transform their totemic novel into a workable movie script. And many of these versions arrived eventually in the hands of director John Huston.
“When I think back,” Huston says, “there seem to’ve been dozens of them. Hundreds of them.”
At first glance, such casting seems odd. Huston’s special talent has always been for the spare and the laconic, as if either Hemingway or Marcus Aurelius were forever present behind his shoulder. There is very little self-pity in Huston or his work; compared with him, Lowry is a babbling whiner. But there are several strains in Huston’s work that do display an affinity with those in Lowry’s. Starting with High Sierra (for which he co-wrote the screenplay from a novel by W. R. Burnett), through The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, The Night of the Iguana, The Misfits, Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, and others, Huston has been fascinated with doomed heroes. These men (they are almost never women) accept fate stoically, knowing that for them it is too late to change or compromise; in an odd way, the Consul is one of them.
Huston has also been intricately involved with Mexico. As a young man, or so the story goes, he rode as a cavalry officer with one of the Mexican revolutionary armies. One of his first notable screenplays (written with Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas Mackenzie) was for Juarez (1939), when Huston was a contract writer at Warners. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Night of the Iguana were filmed in Mexico, and since 1974, Huston has lived in a rambling house in Puerto Vallarta. It is easy to imagine Huston and Lowry wandering the streets of Cuernavaca together, visiting its cantinas and brothels, speaking of prizefighters and Mexican gods and the tragic end of the Spanish Republic. But the two men never met. The scripts for Under the Volcano continued to be written, following Huston to his estate in Ireland through the fifties and sixties, to locations around the world, and finally to Puerto Vallarta. None of them were any good.
Then a script arrived by a young man named Guy Gallo.
Although I have had a certain amount of youthful success as a writer of slow and slippery blues it is as much as my life is worth to play anything in the house.
— Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken
March 13, 1929
Guy Gallo is twenty-eight years old, soft voiced, black haired, and handsome. He is also a good whiskey drinker. On this day, he is sitting on a crude wooden box on a path cut into the side of a hill in the village of Metepec, a dozen miles from Cuernavaca. Across the path, perched on the edge of a steep barranca, is a reconstruction of the Farolito, Lowry’s mythical cantina-whorehouse, where the Consul comes to his squalid end. The infantry of a movie location — technicians, grips, actors, drivers — seems to be everywhere; trailers jam a side road; horses whinny in an improvised corral. Behind Gallo, standing on a hill, their flat Indian faces as impassive as masks, a family of Mexicans watches.
Gallo started writing plays at Harvard, and had two produced. “I went on to the Yale School of Drama, to get a doctorate. At some point during that year, I began to think about Under the Volcano. I’d heard of the book before, of course, but it wasn’t in any course work I’d had, and I hadn’t read it. Then I saw this survey of maybe twenty-five or thirty writers, in the New York Times Book Review, asking them for their favorite books and why, and Lowry’s book was on a lot of the lists. So I went out and bought the book and read it. About three months later, I had this meeting with Paul Bluhdorn, an independent producer who was a friend of a friend, and started talking about Under the Volcano as a possible project. And he said, ‘Well, yeah …’ It wasn’t as if it were preproduction — there was no ironey — it was more a friendly challenge than anything else. But it became a kind of carrot that was dangled in front of me. That’s before we knew how complicated the rights situation was.”
Gallo then went to work. He read Lowry’s novel closely, wrote several critical papers on it, made a bony structural outline. Bluhdorn then told him about a possible producer from Mexico. Could Gallo fill in the skeletal outline, for presentation to this Mexican producer? “It sort of seemed silly to write a prose treatment of a novel,” Gallo says, “so I wrote the screenplay very, very quickly, trying to give Bluhdorn something to sell.”
But then it turned out that the rights were not available, and Bluhdorn lost interest. Gallo put the script away, continued with his schoolwork at Yale, arid wrote two original screenplays. Then his name was given to Michael Fitzgerald, the son of poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, and the producer of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which Huston had directed. Fitzgerald was looking for a writer on another Huston film, and wanted to see some samples of Gallo’s work. Gallo told him he had the original screenplays and his version of Under the Volcano; he’d be glad to send them to Fitzgerald.
“Fitzgerald said no, don’t send Under the Volcano,” Gallo says. “Just send me the original work. So I thought Volcano was dead again.” Then a couple of weeks later, Gallo got a phone call from Fitzgerald. “He had mentioned Volcano to John Huston. Michael had never, ever read it, but just mentioned it to John, something on the order of, ‘Still another version of Under the Volcano/ And John wanted to see it. I sent along a copy and that’s when things started happening.”