Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Harmonia (A) on November 03, 2008 at 20:23:03

In Reply to: RE: Wise Blood posted by manerac on November 03, 2008 at 10:26:56

One of Huston's best, and that's saying something. Brad Dourif and Harry Dean Stanton were both excellent in it too. one of the few examples of a furst rate adpatation of a literary classic. It truly captures the power and tone of the novel - no mean feat. Can't think of another movie that does justice to Flannery O'Connor.

Huston last film is his wonderful adaption of Joyce: The Dead. The last scene of that film, with Gabriel's VO quotation from the original story from The Dubliners, is one of the most moving in all his films. It's one of the most beautiful moments in movies:

"Yes, the newspapers are right: snow is general all over Ireland. Falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

One by one we’re all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion than fade and wither dismally with age.

How long you locked away in your heart the image of your lover’s eyes when he told you that he did not wish to live? I’ve never felt that way myself towards any woman but I know that such a feeling must be love. Think of all those who never were, back to the start of time and me transient as they flickering out as well into their gray world. Like everything around me this solid world itself which they reared and lived in is dwindling and dissolving.

Snow is falling. Falling in that lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lies buried. Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. "

It transposes a bit from another passage in the story to Joyce's original closing lines - and it works perfectly. Always give me a shiver when I watch The Dead.