Though by no means typical of John Huston canon – no Bogart! no punches! – The Dead could not be a more appropriate swansong. Directed from an oxygen tent and a wheelchair, it’s difficult not to think of the entire production as a beautiful memorial service. A family affair, it stars Mr. Huston’s daughter Anjelica and was co-written with his son Tony Huston.
These poignant details seep into an already elegiac proposition. Based of the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners cycle, the film, like its inspiration, suggests that the dead are always among us, that we’re never quite shot of them. Hence, while attending a turn-of-the-century shindig thrown by spinster relatives Kate Morkan (Helena Carroll) and Julia Morkan (Cathleen Delany), Gabriel Conroy sees a curious look upon his wife Gretta’s face. When pressed, she quietly drops a bombshell – “I think he died for me” – leaving her husband with Lady Gregory’s pitiless refrain ringing in his ears – “you have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!”
At once a fond farewell to the director’s ancestral and adopted home – Mr. Huston became an Irish citizen in 1966 – and an elegant mediation on mortality, The Dead can be a purposely stifling affair, a chamber piece that leaves you gasping for air. Even the magnetic Anjelica Huston, playing Gretta with no little aplomb, seems unworldly, as though she might fade out and reveal herself as a ghost at any given moment.
It was virgin territory for John Huston, who, it seems, was a cinematic frontiersman to the very end. Bravo.