Word: huston
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...actresses in long gowns, high collars and tails move about a realistic drawing room replete with chandelier and an old-fashioned square piano; in another room a dining table is set for 16 people. Outside, plastic snow falls steadily. In failing health, near the end of his career, John Huston is filming James Joyce's great short story The Dead...
Even though Huston nearly died several times last year, no one connected with the film is calling it a valedictory. "I spent every moment of my childhood thinking he was going to drop dead any minute," says his daughter Anjelica Huston, 35, who plays the heroine, Gretta Conroy. "He's been brought to his knees in the past four years, but he won't lie down. This project is certainly close to his heart, but not because of any imminent decay...
Indeed, the production has been an affirmation of the family Huston, a confluence of circumstances that sums up two generations of experience. "This picture is very significant to me," says Huston, a Joyce aficionado who lived in Ireland for 25 years and still holds an Irish passport. "It's based on Joyce, it takes place in Ireland, it stars my daughter and is written by my son." The man who directed his father Walter in the 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (for which both won Academy Awards) and guided Anjelica to last year's supporting-actress Oscar...
...Huston has always enjoyed literary subjects. He has tackled Stephen Crane's & The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1956) and Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana (1964). But Joyce offers a special challenge. Lights, camera, no action. "The movie doesn't have a single automobile chase," notes the director dryly. "No gun duels. The biggest piece of action is trying to pass the port." On a snowy Dublin evening during the Christmas season, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta attend his maiden aunts' annual dinner dance. He is a smug, possessive "stout tallish young...
This is hardly the stuff of which box-office triumphs are made. In their search for financing, the producers heard a familiar show-business refrain: "Not mainstream enough" or "Not youth-oriented enough." Because of the fragile state of Huston's health, insurance companies would underwrite the film only on the condition that his friend Director Karel Reisz stand by. The all-Irish cast -- including Donal McCann (as Gabriel), Donal Donnelly and Dan O'Herlihy -- was drawn largely from Dublin's famed Abbey and Gate theaters, but it had no star power in Hollywood's terms. All studios, major, minor...