John

By Michael Walsh

At first glance the symbolism is painfully apparent. On the set of his 37th feature film, in a makeshift studio 35 miles north of Los Angeles and a world away from Hollywood, the 80-year-old director sits in a chair, watching the action on a closed-circuit television monitor and rumbling orders into a microphone. The jauntiness of his warm-up suit is belied by the clear plastic tube that runs from his nose, behind his ears, down his chest and along his leg to an oxygen tank, a last-ditch defense against the emphysema that has plagued him for decades.

Hand-painted tiles, stained-glass windows and brass samovars have transformed a drab warehouse in Valencia into a Dublin interior, circa 1904. Actors and 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 in Prizzi's Honor has now added Tony, 36, the author of the screenplay, to the family business.

The project began, however, with the movie's two German-born producers, Wieland Schulz-Keil and Chris Sievernich, who decided to film The Dead three years ago. "There was never any doubt that we'd do it with John and no one else," says Schulz-Keil. "His way of making movies meshes perfectly with the subject matter. Both he and Joyce tell a story by giving everyday objects allegorical meaning, turning the everyday into the sublime." The decision to hire Anjelica and Tony, the producers insist, was theirs.

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 man," who is preparing some after-dinner remarks with allusions to Browning and classical antiquity that, he fears, will sail over the heads of his unsophisticated audience.

The problem is, the people for whom he has a genial contempt keep upsetting his equilibrium. A harmless pleasantry to the maid about her marriage prospects is rewarded with an unexpectedly bitter rebuke about men. A brief turn on the dance floor with a young woman results in a discomfiting discussion of Irish patriotism. Finally, the innocuous singing of a melancholy Irish air leads Gretta down a bitter path of memory that results in a crushing revelation, of a past life and an unforgotten lover who died for love of her.

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 and independent, turned the film down, despite the low, $5.5 million cost.

Last November, Vestron Pictures, a new Connecticut-based film company, agreed to put up roughly half the money, thanks largely to its executives' interest in Irish literature; the rest of the backing came from Europe. "It's a risk for us, of course," says Vestron Vice President Bill Quigley. "But we consider it one for the soul." For Huston it is one from the heart. Although the story has been expanded to fit the new medium, the director insists it remains faithful to the source. "I don't think that Joyce's spirit would raise its head in holy horror," he says. "The changes we made were undertaken with joy and a light heart."

Working five days a week from 10 to 6 on a tight, seven-week shooting schedule (the exteriors will be shot later in Ireland), Huston has little room for error. Although his physical condition limits his mobility, he still agonizes over the simplest things, laboring to get the effect just right. "I like it when the audience forgets there's a screen, forgets it's a story and just beholds," he says.

An efficient worker, Huston rarely needs more than two takes to get a sequence in the can. Yet a scene in which three actors walk down a flight of stairs is repeated nine times until it has the ideal combination of movement, emotion and technical perfection. Later, while watching some shots of Irish countryside onto which falling snow has been superimposed, Huston frets again. "The snow could be a little darker," he says. "Film some more snow against the evening sky."

And after this film, what next? "I feel neither a contentment with what I've produced nor a burning desire to do more," says Huston. "There are a number of projects I'm contemplating. I couldn't pull back any more than a painter could stop painting or a composer could stop writing music. There's nothing to retire from." Although age and infirmity have taken their toll, in the midst of The Dead there is still life.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles