Fidelities to or departures from literary sources sometimes offer clues as to where one might look in interpreting a film, but they can never serve as evidence of the sort that is found in cinematography, acting, writing, editing, or design.

Who would argue that Shakespeare's As You Like It should be judged according to whether it is worthy of Lodge's Rosalind or that Hitchcock's Vertigo should have been supervised to make sure that it was sufficiently faithful to Boileau's and Narcejac's Entre deux mortes?ĢIt seems to me all but self-evident that we will understand Huston's movie better if we abandon attempts to assign priority to one or the other, if we approach it as we do the multitude of other movies that adapt literary properties, as a work of art in its own right, to be viewed and interpreted equally by those who know the precedent fiction and those who do not. The discourse of power is barely concealed in such utterances it becomes clear enough if one translates them by analogy to adaptations whose dominant positions are accepted without question. Clive Hart, who served as 'academic adviser to the James Joyce Estate' took it upon himself to 'ensure that this film prove worthy of Joyce in general and that it should not, in particular, so misrepresent the tone and spirit of the story that Joyce's name could not creditably be associated with it.' (Hart, 1988, 10-11).

Steve Vineberg concludes that the film of The Dead stands as 'proof that a man of talent, adapting the work of a man of genius, can create something unforgettable.' (Vineberg, 1993, 307). James Naremore remarks that Joyce's 'masterpiece of high modernism is turned into something more immediately accessible, like a well-made movie.' (Naremor, 1991, 16). 1Discussing Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth for Throne of Blood, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto observes that 'fidelity is a misleading and unproductive notion because it establishes a hierarchical relation between original and adaptation… The discourse of adaptation is therefore less the discourse of aesthetics than that of power.' (Yoshimoto, 2000, 258-9) Typical commentaries on Huston's The Dead – and I have selected as examples only critics who praise the movie – confirm Yoshimoto's assertion.

Michael furey the dead