From its release in 1987, John Huston's The Dead – Gente di Dublino was hailed as a masterpiece. This assessment was probably not much influenced by the director's near-immediate death, for he had long been ill yet determined to shoot this final film, even though confined to a wheelchair and hooked up to oxygen tanks. It had been an act of stubborn dedication to the desire to realize this work, a desire dictated by various reasons, on the one hand of a purely artistic nature and on the other emotional and private, which I shall discuss further on.
The screenplay is drawn from the celebrated final story of James Joyce's collection Dubliners, commonly known in Italian as Gente di Dublino. The film adaptation of the story is pointed to by several writers as an illuminating example of fidelity in transposition ("a masterpiece of fidelity to the text, or rather an extraordinary model of lucidity and strategy in the passage from literature to cinema", as Franco Sesti described it in "Cineforum" of December 1987). Indeed the screenplay respects the events narrated by Joyce down to the proportions among the various sections. As in all the stories of Gente di Dublino, in this final episode too the underlying theme is that of immobility, of a stasis swollen with meaning. For this very reason the plot is reduced to a few elements, and the true driving force of the narration lies in the inner movements, in the emotional dynamics of the characters.

Epiphany 1904. As every year, during the Christmas holidays the unmarried sisters Julia and Kate Morkan and their young niece Mary Jane, a pianist and piano teacher (played respectively by Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll and Ingrid Craigie), give a dinner with numerous guests. Few are the moments of the story: the arrival of the guests (a varied humanity, mirror of average Dublin, of average culture, average social standing and high dignity) with the preparations that accompany it, and the unfolding of the dinner, during which they discuss, essentially, this and that, and music too, all of it seasoned with continual allusions to the questions of nationalism, then rampant.
At the end of the dinner, at the moment of the guests' departure, the Morkan sisters' nephew, Gabriel (Donal McCann), the one who has given the ritual speech in honor of the hostesses, and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston, the director's daughter) end up taking on a predominant and truly protagonistic role that until then had belonged mainly to the two sisters, though within a context of well-calibrated and evocative ensemble. When the scene moves outside the Morkan sisters' house, it is indeed Gabriel and Gretta whom we follow on their return by carriage to the hotel where they are staying. It is there that the heart of the narration is played out, the part that explains the story's title. Gretta was, at the moment of departure, deeply moved by the song sung by the tenor Bartell D'Arcy (Frank Patterson). In the last scene we learn precisely the reason for such emotion: the song she heard, The Lass of Aughrim, was always sung by the young Michael Furey, a faithful companion on walks and bearer of a devoted, unexpressed passion for Gretta; already ill, he had ended up definitively ruining his health and dying shortly afterward, only to bid farewell to Gretta as she left Galway for boarding school. The confession of this affair, until then unknown to him, arouses in Gabriel a deep and sad reflection which, starting from his modest role in his wife's life, widens until it touches the supreme and definitive event of death and all that is bound up with it. All this is in the story and in the film. As said before, the respect for the text is extremely high.
Reflecting on why Huston chose this text for his last film is a duty. The coincidence between his own illness and probable, imminent death and the subject of Joyce's text is certainly a plausible reason, and it is easy to speak of the film as a veritable testament, and indeed many writers have done so. However, this consideration alone is not enough to clarify the choice: to explain the genesis of so lofty a work solely by an overtly contingent and autobiographical identification would be reductive. The choice is in reality motivated by other, indispensable elements. There exists, in fact, as said before, a complex of aesthetic and intimate reasons on which it is now worth dwelling, because they can truly explain the force and the sense of the necessity of a dialogue with Joyce felt by Huston.
Certainly one component was played by the Irish origins of the director's family, who regretted having sold the house he owned there; hence a return to the origins of existence, understood, however, mind you, in the sense of a sublimated cultural filiation and not of a simple nostalgia. Then there are the aesthetic reasons, and here the matter becomes truly substantial.
In an interview granted to Davey Allison shortly before his death (Entretien avec John Huston sur les Morts, "Positif", 320, October 1987, p. 5; the translation from the French is mine) Huston says of Joyce:

"he is the writer I have 'felt' most in my life. Ulisse exerted on my generation an influence that endures to this day. A powerful self-awareness, the shifting of form over the course of the book, the ability to merge with the characters and to express himself through them: all things that today are part of the ordinary equipment of any writer.
And yet you said that I Morti is the only work of Joyce's you would have liked to film. Why? Because it constitutes a narrative throughout its whole development. Its interest lies in the small touches of character, revealing of the figures presented, the possibility we are given of coming to know them and of forming judgments about them".

Profound reasons of style, as we can see, that decidedly enrich the picture. Besides his daughter Anjelica, his son Tony too took part in the production, writing the screenplay so faithful (though not slavishly) to Joyce's text.
For the score, on the other hand, Huston called on that attentive and ever-fresh composer who was Alex North (1910-1991. Un tram che si chiama desiderio, Morte di un commesso viaggiatore, Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Good Morning, Vietnam! to cite only a few of his principal works); the two had already made three films together, (Gli spostati in 1960 and, in the 1980s, Sotto il vulcano and L'onore dei Prizzi) and their rapport is palpable. North produced a score of knowing restraint: the presence of the music is discreet. It substantially respects the indications found in Joyce. We have, then, diegetic music, internal to the action, that accompanies the whole long opening sequence (about 25 minutes) of the film: it is the piano of the Morkan household that lets us hear entertaining dance tunes in the taste of the period, with hints of "Irish style". The commentary is continually offered with an effect of nearness and distance that helps to give the sequence depth by simple means. From Joyce too comes the episode that immediately follows: Aunt Julia sings Son vergin vezzosa from Bellini's Puritani, presented with antiquarian aptness in one of those arrangements so much in vogue between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (text translated into English: Arrayed for the Bridal; the music stripped of its structural complexities and reduced to a pleasant strophic melody).

During the dinner sequence, music is entirely absent. It is spoken of, but not heard: an interesting choice, which reinforces the effect of the crucial scene that follows, that of the guests' departure, and the one in which Huston's (and North's) intervention upon Joyce is most refined and intelligent. In the story we read:

"Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing. […] Gabriel said nothing but pointed up the stairs to where his wife was standing. Now that the hall-door was closed the voice and the piano could be heard more clearly. Gabriel held up his hand for them to be silent. The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer's hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:

O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold…

'O,' exclaimed Mary Jane. 'It's Bartell D'Arcy singing and he wouldn't sing all the night.'"[1].

Precisely because the film is, on the whole, a faithful adaptation of Joyce's text, it becomes important to observe more closely the departure that Huston makes in this scene, brief indeed, but precisely essential in its function as the principal dramatic hinge. First of all, Gretta is not at all standing still in the darkness of the stairs when Gabriel comes back in but, while her husband gets ready to leave with Lily's help (Rachel Dowling), she is seen descending and stopping short along the lit staircase, her face lit also by the white veil wrapped around her head. No piano accompanies the singing and, above all, Bartell D'Arcy's voice is not at all thick with cold and hoarse; on the contrary, it is extraordinarily pure, and has nothing to do with the hoarseness imagined by Joyce. For the character Huston chose Frank Patterson, a tenor of the most supple and refined vocal instrument, who here unfolds an immaculate lyric voice.
We witness what has been called "the phenomenon of our song"[2], that is, the process whereby listening to a particular piece is able to unleash emotional reactions that, and this is the essential point, are not memories of particular emotions, but those emotions themselves, immediately and wholly relived, present, as if the music provoked a leap in time. It is something we frequently experience in our lives, in forms more or less pronounced and demanding, and which has nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the music; it may attach itself to a commercial ditty as to a motet by Palestrina: it is enough that the music be linked to an emotionally significant event or condition of the past. In the case at hand this is the pretext for the narrative and conceptual surge that leads to the desolate and moving finale.
Had Huston kept faithful to Joyce and let us hear a hoarse voice, Gretta's reaction would have lost nothing of its force and plausibility from the standpoint of "our song". But there is a fact not to be forgotten: it is one thing to evoke in narration an unpleasant voice and an uncertain performance, leaving the reader to imagine it, and another to make it actually heard. Likewise the gradual disclosure, the sharpening of the song's physiognomy that the technique of narration allows Joyce, would not have worked in cinema. It is certainly easy to recount a piece of music little by little, but in cinema this would make no sense: the song is either there or not, and if it is there it is recognized, without the director being able to make particular approaches. The two media, the printed page and images, work differently, and Huston, in departing from Joyce, becomes faithful to him once more.
Moreover, the song sung by a D'Arcy with a cold would have moved Gretta, but not us, in the sense that Patterson's moonlit voice, by its very intrinsic qualities, proves beautiful, undeniably enjoyable and admirable, and lets us sense, at least subliminally, the gathering of a new emotional substance. The meaning of that suspended and motionless scene, then, lies entirely in its actual capacity to arouse an expectation, to create that narrative tension which sustains the last part of the film and which progressively discloses and clarifies itself.
The dramatic hinge constituted by the song comes decidedly late in the story, and divides the film into two parts differing in setting (the Morkan house and the enclosure of the hotel room), context (the first public and noisy, the second private and intimate) and tone (comedy and drama): of the two parts, the second has an undeniably greater specific weight, in spite of its lesser extent. Huston's intervention prepares the shift, by the means of cinema, to perfection. The very suppression of the piano accompaniment is explained in this sense: it distances this song from the one sung by Aunt Julia, makes it original, less familiar, able to arouse attention. Joyce's story is, in fact, built around this finale: Huston makes it even more explicit.
An old and fortunate ballad readapted to Romantic, that is, modern taste, The Lass of Aughrim behaves like a matryoshka, or a mise en abîme, because it is a story of separation here associated, through the phenomenon of our song, with another, still more intense, story of separation. That this song is consubstantial with the spirit of the film as a whole is shown by the fact that the music of the opening titles (which will return in the closing ones), evocatively entrusted to a Celtic harp, is drawn from its melody: it is a way of giving coherence not only of music but of atmosphere. When the viewer hears it sung by Bartell D'Arcy, that melody is by now unconsciously familiar to him.
The melody of The Lass of Aughrim will return, reworked, in the finale as well, where what in Joyce's story is entrusted in the third person to the narrator here, with sound intuition, becomes Gabriel's monologue, all the more intense since it is barely whispered.
Here the camera wanders outside the room where husband and wife are shut in: these are not flashbacks but real images of something happening at that moment elsewhere. The only escape from the motionless present is a flashforward: the funeral wake for the deceased Aunt Julia.
Here too, with great respect for the verbal component, North and Huston find a special stylistic signature. The scene, of faded colors and lights, is accompanied by a distant and profoundly melancholy music, chiefly entrusted to a solo clarinet, the instrument whose character Berlioz, in his treatise on orchestration, remarked upon as one of "pride that tempers a noble sadness", of being "the voice of heroic love", of "mysterious tendernesses".
The music adheres to the depth of the reflection by growing thinner, stepping aside, almost reducing itself to silence, but without reaching it completely. An exemplary, antirhetorical, sincere symbiosis between image and musical component that leaves us astonished and bare before Joyce's dizzying concluding words.

Notes

[1]The quotations are taken from the Feltrinelli edition: Joyce, James, Gente di Dublino, translated and edited by Daniele Benati, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1994 (17^th ed., 2015). The quoted passage is found on pp. 196-197. Whoever wishes may consult online the first edition of the work: J. Joyce, Dubliners, London, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914 – available at https://archive.org/details/dubliners00joycrich[last accessed 04/05/2016]. The passage in question is on pp. 260-261.

[2] Kivy, Peter, Filosofia della musica. Un'introduzione, edited by Alessandro Bertinetto, Turin, Einaudi, 2007 ("Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. Nuova Serie. Filosofia", 373), pp. 135-137. Kivy's is the reconsideration of the concept of "pathological effect" expressed by Eduard Hanslick, one of the fundamental aestheticians of the nineteenth century, in his Il bello musicale, of 1854.

Works consulted

Davey, Allison, Entretien avec John Huston sur les Morts, "Positif", 320 (October 1987), pp.5-6.

Bernardi, Sandro, Joyce ed Ejzenstein: simbolo, cosa, figura, "Filmcritica" XXXIX/384 (April-May 1988), pp.187-207.

Canby, Vincent, Film: 'The Dead' by Huston, "New York Times", (17 December 1987) (Online at http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/movies/film-the-dead-by-huston.html?pagewanted=1)

Ciment, Michel, Epitaphe et codicille sur les Morts, "Positif", 320 (October 1987), pp. 3-4.

Child, Francis James, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child, Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904 (Online at https://archive.org/stream/englishscottishp1904chil#page/n13/mode/2up)

Bowen, Zach, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce. Early Poetry through Ulysses, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1974, pp. 19-22.

Paolo Valenti holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Bologna. He works mainly on music of the late eighteenth century and early Romanticism and on film music, on both the philological and the aesthetic plane. He is a member of the committee for the Complete Edition of the works of Luigi Cherubini, of the study group on Aesthetics and philosophy of music "Athena Musica", and is a member of the editorial secretariat of the journal "Musica Docta".