One For the Living

When Criterion announced its special edition of John Huston’s The Dead for a January release, I was surprised; surely the right move for a James Joyce adaptation – and one of the few cinematic treatments of Joyce’s work that’s universally acclaimed – is in June, sometime around Bloomsday? But of course The Dead needs to be released in winter. And this week, with its double-wallop of snow and miseries, seemed particularly appropriate.

Every review of The Dead starts with the same piece of information: The Dead was John Huston’s last movie, and he knew it. The venerated filmmaker was 80 years old, diminished by decades of hard living and ravaged by emphysema, when he chose to bring James Joyce’s delicate, painfully internal novella to the screen.

Huston knew he was dying, and the fire-breathing elephant hunter who made The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen and Moby Dick and The Man Who Would Be King and Under the Volcano – the man who played Chinatown’s monstrous Noah Cross – chose to go out with a measured whisper. It’s one of his best films because you cannot believe the same John Huston made it. But there’s his daughter Anjelica in the role of Gretta Conroy, and his son Tony’s name is on the screenplay, so yes, it must be him. And of course it is; The Dead is as cinematic, as fully realized, as thoughtful as the rest of Huston’s work. It’s just quieter.

Joyce’s 1914 story, published in Dubliners, is quiet too. Set a decade earlier, and taking place mostly at a genteel Twelfth Night party thrown by two aging sisters, it’s a study of turn-of-the century Irish attitudes and mores as the guests arrive, fret about manners and gestures, sing a couple of songs and enjoy some hours of warmth together.

But that’s not what “The Dead” is about. Joyce spends his pages steering us towards a crushing epiphany, in which an old ballad catches Gretta unaware, catapulting her into her memories. She’s different after that, and once her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) gets her home she confesses she’s never gotten over the death of a boy she loved as a teenager, and indeed blames herself for the romantic gesture that led to his demise.

It’s not Gretta who experiences the revelation but Gabriel, who’s confronted with the profound, horrible understanding one can never fully know another person – not even one’s beloved – and all of us are ultimately alone, in life and in death. And though The Dead has not had a single line of narration up to that point, Huston knows nothing can convey the impact of Joyce’s story as well as the author did in 1914, and ends his film with McCann reading the last sentences of the story in voiceover. His last act as a filmmaker was to get out of the way.

Despite its reputation, The Dead was fairly hard to find on home video; it wasn’t released on DVD until 2009 … and to add insult to injury, Lionsgate’s initial release was missing ten minutes of the movie. (A corrected edition was available within weeks.) Criterion’s 4K restoration is the first time Huston’s film has been available in HD in North America, and indeed in most of the world. It’s been worth the wait.

In the new UHD master, supervised by DP Fred Murphy, John Huston’s The Dead looks as good as I’ve ever seen it – and perhaps even better than the 35mm print I watched when it first opened. With gaslights and flickering candles emphasizing the close confines of the Morkan sisters’ home, Murphy shrouds the action in darkness, the yellow cast of the lighting enhanced by the dark clothes of the guests’ formal clothing.

There’s a subtle sickliness to the whole film, implying certain characters are walking around wearing their own shrouds, all of it subliminally preparing us for Gretta’s monologue about her beloved Michael Furey, who said goodbye to her in the rain on a cold night knowing he’d likely catch his death. I hadn’t lived enough to appreciate it at the time – I was nineteen when The Dead was in theaters – but now I know that Anjelica Huston’s delivery of Gretta’s story is what heartsickness feels like. It’s the sound of a burden that weighs heavier the longer it’s carried, of grief and regret held close to the heart.

That monologue, which provides the catharsis of Joyce’s story, is the reason John Huston made The Dead when he made it, and why he wanted his son to script it and why he needed to have his daughter perform it. It was one last time to be together, fully and honestly, making something that will outlive them all.

Criterion’s special edition supports the film with a new interview with the Irish novelist Colum McCann – no relation to Donal, as far as I can tell – and two archival supplements of considerable value. Anjelica Huston recalls the production in excerpts from the audiobook of her 2014 memoir Watch Me, and finally there’s Lilyan Sievernich’s hour-long production documentary John Huston and the Dubliners, newly restored in 2K, offering interviews with the cast and crew and a sense of exactly how much of an undertaking The Dead really was for John Huston.

His failing health ruled out a location shoot in Ireland, so the production had to re-create Joyce’s Dublin on soundstages in Arizona. Huston directed the movie from his wheelchair with an oxygen tank close to hand; the hissing from the apparatus meant he couldn’t be on set when the cameras rolled, so he watched takes via a video tap in the next room. (It’s common practice now, of course, but in the mid-80s I think only Francis Ford Coppola was doing it regularly.)

With candid interviews and fly-on-the-wall footage, Sievernich’s documentary demonstrates how fully present Huston was on this picture, even as his body was giving out – and how he went into this final project with the full support of his family and his crew. Everyone wanted to do right by him, and he wanted to do right by Joyce, and by god they made it work. The Dead might be a muted whisper, but it’s as powerful now as it ever was – and maybe more so, now that I’m old enough to hear what it’s saying.

The Dead is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from the Criterion Collection, as well as an individual Blu-ray edition. It is a beautiful thing to behold.

Up next: A new release roundup including Roofman and Wicked: For Good, an English farce and an American B-movie. But not until we’ve dug ourselves out.