J Paul Johnson
When James Joyce wrote, “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age,” his typically Joycean free indirect discourse emanated from the mind, perhaps even the soul, of a single character, that of his Gabriel Conroy, protagonist of “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners, as he ponders his own mortality. Gabriel was reflecting for a moment on his wife Gretta’s palpable reaction to a song sung about a lost lover. In that moment, he wonders if it is better to slip away into melancholia and reverie or to charge ahead towards an uncertain future.
It’s one of several great moments, great lines, in “The Dead,” and perhaps no reader of Joyce’s took it to heart more so than John Huston, who in 1987 directed one of the most satisfying literary adaptations in all of cinema—his last film, helmed from a wheelchair equipped with an oxygen tank in the final months of his failing health. There may be no better example of passing “boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion,” than this film, now available on 4K UHD disc in a lively remaster from The Criterion Collection.
It’s always struck me as ironic that a writer like Joyce whose work is often characterized as cinematic has been so difficult to adapt to film. Writing as a late Modernist during the medium of film’s early years, Joyce frequently employed many of the techniques we associate today with cinema: montage, flashback, close-ups, fades/dissolves, shifting perspectives like camera angles. His stream of consciousness seemed analogous to early surrealist cinema. Yet filmmakers shied away from his work: when Huston began work on his adaptation of “The Dead,” it was only the third film to that date adapt a work of Joyce’s directly (the prior two being Joseph Strick’s 1960s adaptations of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses).
Huston’s near-perfect adaptation The Dead makes it seem like Joyce was a candidate for adaptation all along. Practically the length of a novella despite concluding the Dubliners collection, the story needs neither pruning nor expansion to accommodate the length of a feature film. At about 16,000 words, a read-aloud takes some 90 minutes—a little longer, in fact, than Huston’s film. Its story is set in Dublin at a holiday party (about the time of the Feast of the Epiphany) hosted by the “Misses Morkan,” where Gabriel, a detached, insecure, and quite possibly clinically depressed university professor spends most of the evening ruminating about his past, awkwardly navigating the party guests he despises, and fretting about a speech he will give that matters little to anyone but him. When t the end of the night he sees his wife respond emotionally to a guest’s plaintive rendition of “The Lass of Aughrim,” a song about a lost love—and she did indeed lose a past love before him—Gabriel achieves a moment of epiphany.
Nothing, save for perhaps the story’s third-person, limited-if-shifting perspective and that final epiphany, makes for a challenge in adapting literature to film: the story is contained mostly to a single setting and a few hours of narrative time; it’s grounded in a realistic, if lively, milieu; its singing, dancing, and festivities allow for a rich panoply of cinematic perspectives both maintaining and diverging from a main narrative thread. The challenges come from finding ways to convey the free indirect discourse used to convey Gabriel’s wide-ranging thoughts and final epiphany and from finding equivalents for the Joycean qualities of the story’s language, such as the richly emotive, alliterative chiasmus used at its conclusion: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” (Apologies for the spoiler of a century-plus-old literary work.)
Huston’s film is, like the Misses Morkan’s Feast of the Epiphany party, a family affair. Son Tony wrote the screenplay, young Danny served as an A.D., and daughter Angelica stars as Gretta, alongside Donal McCann as Gabriel leading a cast of Dubliners borrowed largely from the Abbey Theatre—all of whom are wonderfully expressive and idiosyncratic while leaning hard into their Irishness. Angelica Huston has enjoyed a long and impressive career, but few of her roles provide such emotional resonance as does her portrayal of Gretta, a woman tolerating her husband for polite company but silently, then loudly, rueing her long-broken heart.
Tony Huston’s script and John Huston’s direction hew closely to Joyce’s story and even his language, albeit with some mild alterations. The film begins with the arrival of guests rather than party preparations, and a new character is invented to give rise to intensify conflict. Songs and speeches are occasions to provide exposition with close-ups of characters’ reactions and even mementos of, of course, the living and the dead. The film’s depiction of Gabriel’s concluding epiphany, as his thoughts drift from Gretta to himself and ultimately to all of humanity, is breathtaking: the Hustons keep Joyce’s free indirect discourse word for word, spoken in a quiet, melancholy voiceover juxtaposed with images of snow falling “general all over Ireland” and uniting the living and the dead.
It’s breathtaking conclusion to a lovely film. Huston was, of course, keen to adapting works of literature in his long career, having started in the industry as a scriptwriter (on High Sierra and Sergeant York) and then delivering fistfuls of storied films, from The Maltese Falcon and
Treasure of the Sierra Madre to The African Queen and The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick and Wise Blood—adaptations all. Somehow, his work on The Dead seems the most keenly felt of all of these. At the age of 80, he may have needed a wheelchair, an oxygen tank, and an amplifier to do his work but he did it with a commitment that did not waver. Unable to travel to Ireland, Huston shot all of his interiors were shot on a California soundstage, with son Danny and DP Fred Murphy helming exterior location footage in Dublin.
Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by Murphy and featuring a 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, could hardly look any more precise, with great detail, quality, and color. The sound mastering is especially impressive in the party scenes, following trails of dialogue and musical performances adeptly. As is their usual practice, Criterion packages the
4K UHD remaster of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR on one disc, without special features, while those are provided on a second Blu-ray disc. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the film and a 2008 Lionsgate DVD had to be fixed for missing footage. To see Criterion’s new 4K version is to see this lovely adaptation, Huston’s swan song, brought back to life.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Criterion packages one brand new featurette, commissioned for this special edition, alongside two archival segments and two essays.
Colum McCann. The Irish writer (Let the Great World Spin, TransAtlantic, Apeirogon) speaks to the Joyce novella and its adaptation for the film in a 23-minute segment shot for the Criterion Collection in 2025. It’s a decent, if not particularly revealing interview, supplemented with some clips from the films. Criterion does not provide English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for this featurette, a policy of theirs I continue to find inexplicable and inexcusable: if a viewer needs SDH for the main feature (which, of course, are provided), how would they not also need them for supplemental content? McCann’s brogue may challenge viewers who aren’t even hard of hearing; meanwhile, entire generations have come to expect SDH on all content, regardless of their ability or disability.
Anjelica Huston. This 12-minute excerpt from the actress’s 2014 audiobook of her memoir, Watch Me, reflects upon the making of The Dead and the passing of her father. The segment is supplemented with scenes from the film as well as publicity and personal photos. It’s very touching. As with the McCann segment, no SDH are provided.
John Huston and the Dubliners. This hour-long documentary was shot on 16mm in 1987 by Lilyan Sievernich, who was on set for the entirety of the production of The Dead, and then restored in 2K by Criterion in 2025. It’s wonderful, with lots of behind-the-scenes footage focusing on costume and set design, casting and performance, cinematography and direction, with all of the principals participating in interviews. Unlike for the McCann and Huston featurettes, Criterion provides SDH for this segment, and they’re welcome: some of the more candid conversations would be difficult to follow without it.
The clear jewel case double-disc packaging includes a 32-page two-color booklet with two excellent essays: “Another Year,” by Michael Koresky, contextualizing The Dead in Huston’s career, and Tony Huston’s “Family Ties,” originally published in American Film in 1987 and focusing on the film’s conception and production. These are illustrated with remarkably handsome greyscale watercolors of the characters by author/artist Leanne Shapton. The one of Angelica Huston as Gretta on the booklet cover would have made for a much more attractive case cover than the simple one chosen, which might have adorned any of a number of films.
What’s missing? Between the featurettes, essays, and the handsome 4K remaster, Criterion has provided its patrons nearly everything they might wish for in a special edition of The Dead. Save, that is, for the Joyce story itself. In past years Criterion would often enough include a version of the source story itself: titles as diverse as Stagecoach, Ghost World (excerpted), Rashomon, Short Cuts, The Killers, Old Joy, and The Furies all include versions of the source material; Red River and Picnic at Hanging Rock did in their earlier iterations.
James Joyce’s “The Dead” has been in the public domain for years, so it would not be especially costly for Criterion to provide a print or even an audio reading of the story. For that matter, though, I’d hope that anyone interested in Huston’s adaptation and this special edition in particular would seek out the Joyce story if they didn’t already know it. Either stands on its own; together, they dance and circle around each other like a chiasmus of snowfall, each informing the other, both benefiting from their mutual engagement. Adaptation is never a matter of simple transposition or “picking” which is better, book or movie, but in seeing how texts interplay and connect in different media even as they tell what is in essence the same story. And The Dead is as fascinating and bold an example of such as there is.
