The Dead

The Dead

Gretta Conroy

Gabriel Conroy

Mr. Browne

Freddy Malins

Aunt Kate

Aunt Julia

Mary Jane

Lily

Mrs. Malins

Bartell D'Arcy

Molly Ivors

Mr. Grace

Miss O'Callaghan

Miss Higgins

Miss Daly

Mr. Bergin

Mr. Kerrigan

Mr. Duffy

Young Gentleman

Mr. Egan

Miss Power

Cabman

Nightporter

Young Lady (uncredited)

In the February 1988 issue of 'Film Comment,' critic Stephen Harvey put this film on his Ten Best Films of 1987 list.

The character Mr. Grace does not appear in Joyce's original story. He is an invention of John and Tony Huston's, and was chiefly included so as to permit a reading of the eighth-century Irish poem Donal Og ("Young Donal"). Although it represents a departure from Joyce's text, the poem is nonetheless appropriate to the story's themes: like the song "The Lass of Aughrim" that follows it, "Donal Og" deals with the suffering that love can bring to young women...just as it has for Gretta.

The final shot is not of Ireland, but of snow falling in Joshua Tree National Park, California.

Molly Ivors: I didn't think you were a West Briton!

Gabriel Conroy: [voice over] 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 ever were, back to the start of time. And me, transient as they, flickering out as well into their grey 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.

Gabriel Conroy: [asking Gretta about Michael Furey] What was it he died of so young? Consumption, was it?