by SARAH ROWLAND

"Badgez?.... I don't have to show you any steenkin' badgez!" This is without a doubt the most famous (and misquoted) line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which you can hear in surround sound during Montreal's upcoming John Huston retrospective. From Jan. 19 through Mar. 12, the Cinémathèque québécoise will present 26 Hustonian classics, including time-honoured masterpieces, underrated gems, painfully bad turkeys, quasi-comebacks and a new print of the Bogart/Bacall classic Key Largo.

Several other selections from the director's Bogie era (1941–1953), which many consider to be his best work, will be treated to the big screen. They include his first feature The Maltese Falcon, a detective story that is largely responsible for a slew of pulp fiction copy cats that relied on clever Ping-Pong dialogue and great trench coats. And of course, what homage to the Ernest Hemingway of cinema would be complete without The African Queen, a boozin' huntin' testosterone-led adventure, beautifully rendered by arguably the most macho American filmmaker ever.

His less-appreciated treasures from the '70s won't be overlooked either, with Wise Blood and Fat City, which stars TV's notorious coke head Stacy Keach as a boxer whose career is going down for the count.

Speaking of which, Annie? Nobody can ever really be sure what Huston was thinking in the early '80s. Phobia, for instance, a weak thriller about a wacked-out shrink, signalled a new fallible era for the great director.

But by 1984, the 78-year-old had officially earned legendary status and his blunders were largely forgiven. He started making respected films with daughter Anjelica, most notably Prizzi's Honor, starring Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner as a couple of hired guns who fall in love. The two mobsters try to keep their personal and professional lives separate, but this proves nearly impossible after they've been assigned to off each other. In 1987 Huston passed away, the same year his last film was released. Ironically, it was only in this final hour that he chose to pay tribute to his Irish roots by adapting James Joyce's short story aptly titled The Dead.

For info about show showtimes, visit www.cinematheque.qc.ca

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