The Dead (1987 film)

On January 6, 1904, spinster sisters Kate and Julia Morkan and their unmarried niece, Mary Jane, host their annual Epiphany dinner party at their townhouse in Dublin. Horse-drawn carriages arrive with guests on the snowy night. Three of Mary Jane's music students, Miss O'Callaghan, Miss Furlong, and Miss Higgins, enter, accompanied by the young bachelors Joseph Kerrigan and Raymond Bergin, who Miss Furlong formally introduces to Kate and her frail older sister, Julia.

Dan Brown, the only Protestant invited to the party, arrives next, followed by Kate's favorite nephew, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife Gretta. Kate is worried that Freddy Malins will show up drunk, and when he does, Gabriel promptly escorts the man to the restroom to sober him up. After a few more drinks with Mr. Brown, Freddy goes to talk to his mother, who lives in Scotland with her daughter, and Mrs. Malins berates him for failing to meet her for tea earlier.

The guests dance, Mary Jane performs a virtuosic piece on the piano, and a guest named Mr. Grace recites a poem he calls "Broken Vows", which is a lament of lost love, during which Gretta's eyes grow misty. When the dancing restarts, Kate pairs Gabriel with Molly Ivors, an Irish nationalist colleague of his. She chides Gabriel for writing for an English newspaper and not learning Irish, and in response, he declares he is sick of Ireland.

While Gretta is attempting to persuade Gabriel that they should go on a summer trip to the Aran Islands that Molly mentioned, Kate announces that Julia is going to sing "Arrayed for the Bridal", an operatic piece from her "concert days". Despite her warbling voice, Freddy drunkenly gushes over the performance, and Kate complains about the Pope ending her sister's singing career in the church choir when he replaced the women with boys.

When it is time to eat, Molly leaves the party to attend a union meeting. During the sumptuous feast, conversation topics range from opera to morality. Freddy reliably utters the wrong things, but despite his nerves, Gabriel gives a rousing speech praising the wonderful Irish hospitality shown by Kate, Julia and Mary Jane.

As the guests are leaving, Mrs. Malins asks Gabriel to look after Freddy when she returns to Scotland, and Gabriel awakens Mr. Brown and puts him in a carriage with the Malins. When almost everyone is gone, Bartell D’Arcy, a "celebrated tenor" who had not sung anything all evening, sings "The Lass of Aughrim" to Miss O'Callaghan, and Gabriel watches Gretta as she listens transfixed from the stairs. Her pensiveness continues in the carriage on the way to the hotel where she and Gabriel are staying the night, and she dismisses Gabriel's attempts to cheer her.

In their hotel room, Gabriel asks Gretta what she is thinking, and she explains that when she was young and lived with her grandmother in Galway, a boy she knew named Michael Furey used to sing "The Lass of Aughrim". She says she feels responsible for his death at age seventeen as, on the night before she returned to the convent in Dublin where she went to school, Michael left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye, and he died a week later. Gretta cries herself to sleep, and Gabriel thinks that he has never felt love like the love Michael must have felt for Gretta and that it is better to die young and passionate than to wither and fade away like Julia, and presumably he will. Looking out the window, he imagines the snow falling all over Ireland, "upon all the living and the dead."

Tony Huston's screenplay was a fairly close adaptation of the original story, with some alterations made to the dialogue to aid the narrative for cinema audiences. The most significant change to the story was the inclusion of a new character, Mr. Grace, who, in the film, recites an English translation of the eighth-century Middle Irish poem "Donal Óg".[6][7]

Weiland Schulz-Keil and Chris Sievernich, the producers of the film, had previously raised the money for Huston's 1984 film Under the Volcano. Screen rights to "The Dead" were purchased from the Joyce estate for $60,000.[1]

Filming began on 19 January 1987.[1] According to Pauline Kael, "Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he'd never gone into before - funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. Huston never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically."[8]

Anjelica Huston said her father remained a filmmaking virtuoso despite his ill health: "He was so sick, but he could literally do it with his eyes closed. He knew when we were going to get a take way long before the camera rolled. I mean the timing was so precise that he could tell everything, exactly how it was going to go."[9] The pressures of filming and watching her father's health deteriorate had an adverse effect on her own health, and she developed Epstein-Barr syndrome during production.[9]

The Dead was released on DVD by Lionsgate on November 3, 2009, but the initial pressing was missing nearly ten minutes of footage from early in the film.[10] After word of this was posted on various websites, Lionsgate eventually corrected the mistake and released the full-length version.

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited The Dead as one of his 100 favorite films.[11]

The Dead received mostly positive critical reviews. The film holds a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 31 reviews.[12]

Winner

• 1987: Tokyo International Film Festival Special Achievement Award – John Huston
• 1988: National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film[13]
• 1988: Independent Spirit Award for Best Director – John Huston[14]
• 1988: Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female – Anjelica Huston[14]
• 1989: Bodil Award for Best Non-European Film (awarded by the Danish Film Critics Association)[15]
• 1989: Fotogramas de Plata for Best Foreign Film (awarded by the Spanish film magazine Fotogramas)
• 1989: London Critics Circle Film Award for Director of the Year – John Huston[16]

Nominated

• 1988: Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium – Tony Huston[17]
• 1988: Academy Award for Best Costume Design – Dorothy Jeakins
• 1988: Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay – Tony Huston[14]
• 1988: Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography – Fred Murphy[14]

• The Dead at IMDb
• The Dead at Rotten Tomatoes
• New York Times review