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The Dead John Huston's last film, released posthumously, is a wonderfully faithful, beautiful and moving adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead," the final (and by far the longest) story in Dubliners.
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The Dead is set in early January of 1904, on the day of Epiphany. The story itself is an epiphany, a revelation of the weight of the past triggered by rather ordinary events. The film is also an epiphany of John Huston's perception of human nature. There is something almost unreal and magical about Huston's witty and elegiac last hurrah.
At their Dublin home, the Misses Morkan, two aged spinsters and their niece, all musicians, give their yearly dinner party for relatives and friends. Overall, the guests seem to be a fairly well-adjusted --even merry -- group, yet, as people are treated to drinks and dancing, to piano pieces and a recitation, there is a bit of tension in the air. Will Freddy (Donal Donnelly, who carries off splendidly all the nuances, from near-tipsy to near-sober) come in stewed ("screwed" in Joyce's text)? Can he face the judgment of his aged mother? Will the Misses Morkan remain unflustered and do the right thing by their guests? Can dinner talk --on singers people have known, on politics, on the Pope -- stay within social proprieties?
There's nothing outwardly dramatic about any of this, but it is all so well written, mounted and performed that it has the fascination of a complex miniature.
From the start, a gradual crescendo of feather-weight touches singles out nephew Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) who has come quite a distance with his wife of many years Gretta (Anjelica Huston). They have taken an hotel room for the night. Little things are troubling Gabriel: a maid's riposte about the nature of males ("The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you") ; his mandatory after-dinner speech which Gabriel, an academic and book reviewer, thinks may be over the untutored heads of his audience; a nationalistic colleague and dancing partner who taunts him for being an unpatriotic "West Briton"; a general, unspecified malaise. But he performs well his tasks of goose-carving and complimenting his hostesses, and by extension, praising the spirit of Ireland and its hospitality.
At party's end,as Gabriel and Gretta are leaving, unexpectedly, the voice of tenor Bartell d' Arcy (Frank Patterson), who earlier had politely declined to sing, is heard singing "The Lass of Aughrim." Gretta almost freezes on the stairs, as if overcome by the sad beauty of the song.
The evening also brings to Gabriel a new longing, sentimental and sexual, for his wife. In the cab to the hotel he chats with her in the somewhat awkward way of a man making overtures -- but Gretta is melancholy and distracted. In their room, Gabriel's advances result in Gretta revealing to him that the song which had so affected her used to be sung, in her youth in Galway, by Michael Furey, her first love, who died at seventeen. "I think he died for me" she says. When Michael heard that Gretta was leaving for convent-school, the boy, a consumptive, left his bed and came to her window on a cold winter night.
Gretta falls asleep. Gabriel, standing by the window and watching the snow covering the land, thinks of Michael, compares that great love with "how poor a part he, husband, had played in her life." He gives voice (the thoughts in the book become a voice-over) to his self-doubts, his inner turmoil, his reflections on death and the evanescence of time. "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."
One cannot really sketch out the unsummarizable "The Dead," which does not take long to read, though it does take longer to savor the weight of its every line. The bulk of the story is taken up by the party, with the last fifth of the text concentrating on the Gabriel-Gretta couple. The film respects those proportions. John Huston and his son, scriptwriter Tony Huston, made minor changes or shifts . These do not affect the original. Physically, Joyce 's Gabriel, (a glass-wearing "stout, tallish young man" ); Freddy ("a young man of about forty"); or the singer D' Arcy ("a dark-complexioned young man"), may not correspond precisely to the film's figures, but there is no harm done. A new, minor character is introduced (he does the recitation). A cabman is given some new lines. Gabriel's amusing anecdote about a horse is transposed to the ride in the cab, a clever move which fleshes out that transitional section while lightening the conversational element of the party. Had this not been done, since the indirect speech of the text necessarily becomes time-consuming dialogue in the film, the ratio of party to post-party scenes might have been off balance.
The entire cast, all Irish by birth or citizenship, is admirable. Huston was, to the end, a master director of actors. The conjunction of performances, dialogue and cinematography allows some slight modifications, elaborations and stresses which help the text come alive. Semi-senile Aunt Julia's singing becomes unsteady in the movie, while D'Arcy's is not affected by his cold, as in the story. The drinking Freddy produces pleasant new bits of comic relief business. When, in the nostalgic talk of past singers, Aunt Kate, the main host, speaks of the best tenor she had ever known, her performance adds to the text a strong sense of melancholy which heralds the emotions of scenes to come.
Prose-to-screen adaptation is a notoriously risky business. It is an accepted fact that most of the best films from literary sources come from minor --e ven mediocre -- writing. The challenge of true literature is augmented here by that posed by the "unfilmable" Joyce. Some Joyceans may cavil at certain aspects of the movie, but it is pointless to make intolerant comparisons between totally different media. Oil is oil and vinegar is vinegar. We should be grateful when they combine into a good dressing.
The subtle job done in "The Dead" is, in an unassuming fashion, a tour-de-force in the way it allies respect for Joyce and cinematic imagination. One might expect John Huston, a very ill old man who directed this film from a wheelchair, and attached to breathing machinery, to have been an old man in a hurry. This he was emphatically not. He let his music play out, giving us full piano pieces, full dances and full songs, including the turning point, "The Lass of Aughrim" which, in the story, is broken off. This sort of completeness is filmic courage in an age of impatient publics,but is not new for Huston. Already, in the wedding sequence of "Prizzi's Honor," he had his soprano sing the entire "Ave Maria" while the camera explored the audience leisurely and minutely, setting up moods and relationships.
The exteriors of "The Dead" were shot in Ireland, and the inteiors were filmed in a warehouse in Valencia, California. But the production values are of such a high order that the movie has the authentic look which is so typical of Huston's work. The production was an expanded family affair for the Hustons (John, Tony, Anjelica) and collaborators like assistant director Tom Shaw, a faithful John Huston regular. The sense of the participants' love for what they're doing is palpable. --Edwin Jahiel
Director John Huston (1906 - 1987)'s critical reputation as
one of America's leading directors was reestablished with the twin success of Prizzi's
Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). But it is his earlier films, especially The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951) and The
Maltese Falcon (1941) which will ultimately be responsible for Huston's place in film
history as a teller of imaginative tales of enchantment, quest and loss.
The son of noted stage and screen actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar for his role in his son's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), John Huston was a juvenile actor on the vaudeville circuit, a champion boxer, a painter, a leading man on the legitimate stage, a writer and reporter and even a lieutenant in the Mexican cavalry. After an abortive career as a screenwriter in the early 1930s, Huston returned to Hollywood later in the decade and achieved great renown with his contributions to six screenplays written under contract at Warner Bros., including Jezebel (1938), High Sierra (1941) and Sergeant York (1941). Even after he became a director, Huston would continue to contribute substantially to the screenplays of all his films.
Huston made a stunning debut as a director with The Maltese Falcon. One of the first examples of film noir, this stylistically assured feature revealed his interests in ironic comedy and the motif of the unresolved quest. The Maltese Falcon is one of the most influential and enjoyable of the cinema's masterworks.
Between 1948 and 1952, Huston produced a succession of important films. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre refined the Huston theme of the quest into an archetype and cemented his critical reputation, largely thanks to a series of reviews and articles by James Agee—who would later write the screenplay for The African Queen. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) proved Huston's ability to manipulate simultaneously a variety of characters and stories; the film's sharply drawn milieu and unusual symphathy for its criminal protagonists mark it as among Huston's most compelling works. The Red Badge of Courage (1951) began Huston's identification as an adaptor of literary classics. This film also marked the first of several visually stylized features which Huston based on specific visual sources. The Red Badge took its groupings of figures and sun-bleached tones from Matthew Brady's daguerrotypes of the Civil War; the compositions in Moby Dick (1956) emulate scrimshaw carvings from the whaling days it depicts; and Moulin Rouge (1952) utilizes a color scheme based on Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, which are themselves an important part of the film's narrative. This period of maturity and experimentation also saw the production of The African Queen, an essentially two-character film which underscored Huston's deft control of actors.
Huston's reputation suffered a series of setbacks over the next 20 years. A tumultuous personal life mirrored this decline, but Huston continued his dedication to literary adpatations. In 1963, with Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, Huston began an acting career, appearing in his own and others' films. He provided narration for a multitude of TV shows and documentary films, and appearances in public service campaigns and his outspoken opposition to colorization gained him further public recognition. By the time of his death, Huston's craggy, beautifully ugly face and melodious baritone voice made him one of the few directors of his era as familiar to his public as any of his stars.
Fat City (1972), a sorrowful story of the ebbing fortunes of a washed-up boxer, marked the start of Huston's comeback in the critical community. The Man Who Would Be King, originally planned more than 20 years previous as a vehicle for Bogart and Gable, remains Huston's most fully realized quest narrative. Wise Blood (1979), a compelling piece of Southern Gothic based on Flannery O'Connor's novel, similarly represents one of Huston's greatest achievements as an adaptor of literature. After the disasters of Victory (1981) and Annie (1982), Huston scored another triumph with Prizzi's Honor, a grim but somehow hilarious and touching comedy of love among mobsters. The film won a supporting actress Oscar for Huston's daughter Anjelica, mirroring father Walter's win for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
Huston's final completed film was The Dead (1987), another long-cherished literary adaptation, of James Joyce's short story. Huston's son Tony adapted the story and Anjelica was featured in the cast. At the time of his death, he was involved in the production of Mr. North (1988) as writer and producer, with his son Danny directing.
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