Critique of the John and Angelica Houston film of Joyce’s The Dead

Critique of the John and Angelica Houston film of Joyce’s The Dead

LEAD: ”ONE by one we’re all becoming shades,” says Gabriel Conroy, looking out into Dublin’s bleak winter dawn. Gretta, the wife he loves and suddenly realizes he has never known, lies asleep on the bed nearby. His own life now seems paltry: ”Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

WRITE THIS ESSAY FOR ME

Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper.

Get Help Now!

”ONE by one we’re all becoming shades,” says Gabriel Conroy, looking out into Dublin’s bleak winter dawn. Gretta, the wife he loves and suddenly realizes he has never known, lies asleep on the bed nearby. His own life now seems paltry: ”Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

These words are spoken toward the end of ”The Dead,” John Huston’s magnificent adaptation of the James Joyce story that was to be the director’s last film.

Some men pass boldly into that other world at 17. Huston was 81 when he died last August. He failed physically, but his talent was not only unimpaired, it was also richer, more secure and bolder than it had ever been. No other American film maker has ended a comparably long career on such a note of triumph.

”The Dead” and ”Prizzi’s Honor” (1985), Huston’s altogether different, exuberantly melodramatic comedy, comprise a one-two punch quite unlike anything I can remember in movies. Who would have thought the old man had so much passion in him?

”The Dead” is so fine, in unexpected ways, that it almost demands a re-evaluation of Huston’s entire body of work. Like most American film makers of his generation, Huston depended largely on what Hollywood calls pre-sold properties, on novels that had been published and plays that had been produced. Of his 37 theatrical features, beginning with ”The Maltese Falcon” in 1941, all but 10 were adaptations.

The free-ranging restlessness of Huston’s mind is seen in his choice of authors: B. Traven, Dashiell Hammett, Herman Melville, Richard Condon, Rudyard Kipling, Noel Behn, the fellows who wrote the Old Testament, W. R. Burnett, Flannery O’Connor, Malcolm Lowry and now (one might think the most difficult of all) James Joyce. It’s not, however, just the variety of writers that’s of interest but also the particular material.

”The Dead,” taken from ”Dubliners,” which was published in 1914, may be the finest story in the collection, but it has, it would seem, just two scenes, not much for a man who put such store by conventional narrative. The first scene, which lasts approximately an hour in the film, is the annual post-New Year’s holiday party given by two elderly Dublin sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan, and their unma……………….