Speak of Albert Lewin's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and TCM will run it for their 31 Days of Oscar. It won for the coolly black-and-white cinematography of Harry Stradling, it was nominated as well for the elegant tableaux of its art direction and the supporting acting of Angela Lansbury in her second Oscar nod and third screen role and all were fairly recognized, but the thing that keeps me returning to this movie is a scene that was written for the film and doesn't run eight minutes and even in a foundational work of queer cinematic horror shines around the censors to this day. I've never seen its character actor in as good a part again, but we're used to that around here.
Like the 1890 novel of which it is at once a surprisingly faithful and an absorbingly weird adaptation, the film has virtues beyond its ability to speak past its codes. Hurd Hatfield looks more like a fin-de-siècle marble than the passionate fair Narcissus described by Oscar Wilde, but he makes an eerily beautiful Dorian all the same, his archaic smile and the dark inlays of his eyes hardening into their own death mask as the years go on. Even before he's identified as a literal bachelor uncle, we can see for ourselves that Lowell Gilmore's Basil Hallward is so transparently in love with Dorian that the script really doesn't need the excuse of "one of the seventy-three great gods of Egypt" to infuse the picture with enough magic to make a fateful prayer of eternal youth come true—it's charged in the air every time Basil looks at him, the artist fascinated by his subject in the oldest and most sorcerous sense of the word. George Sanders' Lord Henry Wotton may be even more carelessly diabolical than his book-self, rattling off epigrams like butterfly bombs until something like a conscience surprises him at last, far too late for any of them: "Heaven forgive me." Donna Reed's Gladys Hallward was invented for purposes of narrative convention and feels like it, but Lansbury's Sibyl Vane is more than just a refrigerator girl in the time she's allowed, her voice as innocently crystalline as her suitor still looks. As for the picture, there are appropriately two of it, the life study by Henrique Medina and its monstrous successor by Ivan Albright. We see them both in shocks of Technicolor, the one mysteriously suggestive with its tintings of jade and mauve, the other seethingly, almost psychedelically grotesque. It looks like it's chewing itself off the canvas, splotched and crawling with its sins like fungus and spirochetes; by the end it looks more than anything like a luminescent corpse, as if Dorian's body should have died long ago from the excesses he's passed on to his painted scapegoat and the price of all that decadence catching up to him at once is what kills him as surely as the sympathetic magic of the knife in the picture's heart. It was such a small change to begin with, the suggestion of a sneer at the side of the sweet, frank mouth: the scar of the experiment in cruelty that ended in the suicide of Sibyl Vane.
The scene in question can be counted among the sequelae to that tragedy, innumerable scandals and at least one case of murder later. Richard Fraser's James Vane never saw clearly or even heard the real name of the man who ruined his sister, only the romantic nickname of "Sir Tristan" and once the restless combing storm of Chopin's Prelude No. 24. Eighteen years later, the same melody draws the morose sailor out of a street preacher's audience into the dingiest gin-mill in Blue Gate Fields, where an old man with the look of a silver lion is playing to the nearly deserted hovel as if to the Royal Albert Hall; baffled in the dull oil-light, he slaps down a coin for the man to change the tune to the "Moonlight Sonata" and allows a prostitute to pour him a drink. He does not recognize Dorian when that gentleman enters, an imperturbable apparition in evening dress. But in the dimming corner, a fair-haired man who can't be more than thirty years old, though he's much more than three sheets to the wind, introduces the newcomer by name: "This is Sir Tristan, Kate darling." His own name is Adrian Singleton and his pale, broken face is almost still handsome; he was Dorian's friend and he is no one now. For benefit of the superfluous B-girl, he is chalking onto the tabletop another picture of Dorian Gray, an empty-eyed caricature in the nouveau style which he proceeds to surmount with the crossbeam of a gallows and a hangman's noose. With wistful irony, he quotes, "'And, green or dry, a man must die before it bears its fruit . . .'" Dorian exits unmoved, but not before James has caught the nickname and rushed out in vengeful pursuit, while a delighted Adrian tows the prostitutes out into the street to see the fun. "Justice has come to England!" he breathes, as of his first clean air in years; he makes sure to drink to it, "without wig or gown." But of course this slim, feline youth gazing back so mildly from the fluttering rim of the gaslight can't be Sibyl's toff, who by now must be some aging roué; reluctantly the older man releases his prey and Dorian disappears as if into the arch of night. "Why didn't you murder him?" Adrian demands. Irritably, he is sketching another gallows-tree on the dirty grey wall between them while the women glance warily at one another and away. "How old do you think he is?" The question doesn't follow for James; he hazards, "Twenty-two, I'd say," and can't understand the unpleasant little chuckle he receives in return. "Dorian Gray," the artist informs him, smiling sourly, "has looked twenty-two for the last twenty years."—"What did you say his name was?" And beside the waiting noose, with the same deliberate, insolent strokes, Adrian chalks the name and address of Dorian Gray of Mayfair and Selby.
The novel makes less of the confrontation between Dorian and James; the subplot to which it belongs was a late addition and a good one, but their actual encounter is briefer and more diffuse and it's missing the film's curious punch. There Adrian Singleton is a disgraced debtor in an opium den who shares a listless drink with his former friend, while the sailor who suddenly springs after the slumming stranger receives his supernatural enlightenment from a haggard woman of the streets: "Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am!" Compositing these two characters is a piece of genius on the film's part, not least because it's a chef's kiss of coding. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898) isn't invoked for nothing. The film can afford it—eighteen years on from 1886 is four years after the death of Wilde, already acknowledged in earlier dialogue as "a brilliant young Irishman out of Oxford." Lewin's screenplay never states the particulars of Dorian's sins, but leaves no doubt that he's acid to all who get close to him, men and women in equal measure, disfiguring, destroying, fatal. Certain gentlemen's sons are no longer received in polite company because of him; there are ladies formerly effusive of his charms who will blanch and leave a dinner if he attends. He owns an unknown number of secrets and deploys them as he pleases. These were the rumors voiced by Basil Hallward, so desperate to hear his idol deny them that he was murdered to keep the secret behind their reality; in Morton Lowry's Adrian Singleton, we see them manifest. Like the classically skilled pianist whose presence in this broken-down sink goes similarly, effectively unexplained, drunken, drawing, bitchy Adrian seems to have slid under the glossy skin of MGM from somewhere sadder and stranger, his matter-of-fact sordid self-despair more chilling than the coyest intimations of Victorian misbehavior. We don't even need any speeches, just the way his self-mocking twist of a smile slips off his face as he looks up at Dorian, that porcelain mask floating in bad lamplight: "I've had too many friends."
The first time I saw The Picture of Dorian Gray, I expected it to have been too badly cramped by the Production Code to pass as even a primer of Wilde; the fact that it surprised me pleasantly otherwise doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws. The score by Herbert Stothart can be crashingly mickey-mousing. However well performed by Cedric Hardwicke, the omniscient narration bewilders me by using almost none of Wilde's text. The little statue of Sekhmet or Bast has a name-checked antecedent in "The Sphinx" (1894) and it's cute of the camera to refer malevolently to it without the characters noticing, but it's still an unnecessary touch of Orientalism in a narrative where the English heart is capable of working the most dreadful enchantments of its own. I can grudgingly accept the substitution of Gladys Hallward for the novel's offstage Hetty Merton, but I can't see Peter Lawford's David Stone as anything other than the most cookie-cutter of obligatory het consolations. I like Hatfield's deathly, smiling immobility, as if he were embalmed within his own youthful image—it may be the coldest portrayal of a sensualist I've ever seen—and I respect the opinion of viewers for whom he comes off as simply stiff. I suspect it works for me in part because the film itself is not so mannered; he's a frozen thing in a living world, especially vivid at the level of the bit players. The gin-mill pianist is Pedro de Cordoba; the prostitutes are Renee Carson and Lilian Bond; Skelton Knaggs creeps around with the drinks and this time around I realized that the street preacher is the ubiquitous Arthur Shields. The murder of Basil Hallward is filmed in slicing expressionist shadows and the blackmailing of Douglas Walton's Alan Campbell is done by daylight the next morning, courteously cruel. Moyna Macgill even turns up at a party. And none of it sticks with me like Adrian Singleton and his sardonic, listing satisfaction at being able to name the man who ruined him. I have never seen another version of the novel and I almost don't want to, knowing none of them will contain him. My apologies to Oscar Wilde. This portrait brought to you by my surpassing backers at Patreon.
Like the 1890 novel of which it is at once a surprisingly faithful and an absorbingly weird adaptation, the film has virtues beyond its ability to speak past its codes. Hurd Hatfield looks more like a fin-de-siècle marble than the passionate fair Narcissus described by Oscar Wilde, but he makes an eerily beautiful Dorian all the same, his archaic smile and the dark inlays of his eyes hardening into their own death mask as the years go on. Even before he's identified as a literal bachelor uncle, we can see for ourselves that Lowell Gilmore's Basil Hallward is so transparently in love with Dorian that the script really doesn't need the excuse of "one of the seventy-three great gods of Egypt" to infuse the picture with enough magic to make a fateful prayer of eternal youth come true—it's charged in the air every time Basil looks at him, the artist fascinated by his subject in the oldest and most sorcerous sense of the word. George Sanders' Lord Henry Wotton may be even more carelessly diabolical than his book-self, rattling off epigrams like butterfly bombs until something like a conscience surprises him at last, far too late for any of them: "Heaven forgive me." Donna Reed's Gladys Hallward was invented for purposes of narrative convention and feels like it, but Lansbury's Sibyl Vane is more than just a refrigerator girl in the time she's allowed, her voice as innocently crystalline as her suitor still looks. As for the picture, there are appropriately two of it, the life study by Henrique Medina and its monstrous successor by Ivan Albright. We see them both in shocks of Technicolor, the one mysteriously suggestive with its tintings of jade and mauve, the other seethingly, almost psychedelically grotesque. It looks like it's chewing itself off the canvas, splotched and crawling with its sins like fungus and spirochetes; by the end it looks more than anything like a luminescent corpse, as if Dorian's body should have died long ago from the excesses he's passed on to his painted scapegoat and the price of all that decadence catching up to him at once is what kills him as surely as the sympathetic magic of the knife in the picture's heart. It was such a small change to begin with, the suggestion of a sneer at the side of the sweet, frank mouth: the scar of the experiment in cruelty that ended in the suicide of Sibyl Vane.
The scene in question can be counted among the sequelae to that tragedy, innumerable scandals and at least one case of murder later. Richard Fraser's James Vane never saw clearly or even heard the real name of the man who ruined his sister, only the romantic nickname of "Sir Tristan" and once the restless combing storm of Chopin's Prelude No. 24. Eighteen years later, the same melody draws the morose sailor out of a street preacher's audience into the dingiest gin-mill in Blue Gate Fields, where an old man with the look of a silver lion is playing to the nearly deserted hovel as if to the Royal Albert Hall; baffled in the dull oil-light, he slaps down a coin for the man to change the tune to the "Moonlight Sonata" and allows a prostitute to pour him a drink. He does not recognize Dorian when that gentleman enters, an imperturbable apparition in evening dress. But in the dimming corner, a fair-haired man who can't be more than thirty years old, though he's much more than three sheets to the wind, introduces the newcomer by name: "This is Sir Tristan, Kate darling." His own name is Adrian Singleton and his pale, broken face is almost still handsome; he was Dorian's friend and he is no one now. For benefit of the superfluous B-girl, he is chalking onto the tabletop another picture of Dorian Gray, an empty-eyed caricature in the nouveau style which he proceeds to surmount with the crossbeam of a gallows and a hangman's noose. With wistful irony, he quotes, "'And, green or dry, a man must die before it bears its fruit . . .'" Dorian exits unmoved, but not before James has caught the nickname and rushed out in vengeful pursuit, while a delighted Adrian tows the prostitutes out into the street to see the fun. "Justice has come to England!" he breathes, as of his first clean air in years; he makes sure to drink to it, "without wig or gown." But of course this slim, feline youth gazing back so mildly from the fluttering rim of the gaslight can't be Sibyl's toff, who by now must be some aging roué; reluctantly the older man releases his prey and Dorian disappears as if into the arch of night. "Why didn't you murder him?" Adrian demands. Irritably, he is sketching another gallows-tree on the dirty grey wall between them while the women glance warily at one another and away. "How old do you think he is?" The question doesn't follow for James; he hazards, "Twenty-two, I'd say," and can't understand the unpleasant little chuckle he receives in return. "Dorian Gray," the artist informs him, smiling sourly, "has looked twenty-two for the last twenty years."—"What did you say his name was?" And beside the waiting noose, with the same deliberate, insolent strokes, Adrian chalks the name and address of Dorian Gray of Mayfair and Selby.
The novel makes less of the confrontation between Dorian and James; the subplot to which it belongs was a late addition and a good one, but their actual encounter is briefer and more diffuse and it's missing the film's curious punch. There Adrian Singleton is a disgraced debtor in an opium den who shares a listless drink with his former friend, while the sailor who suddenly springs after the slumming stranger receives his supernatural enlightenment from a haggard woman of the streets: "Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am!" Compositing these two characters is a piece of genius on the film's part, not least because it's a chef's kiss of coding. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898) isn't invoked for nothing. The film can afford it—eighteen years on from 1886 is four years after the death of Wilde, already acknowledged in earlier dialogue as "a brilliant young Irishman out of Oxford." Lewin's screenplay never states the particulars of Dorian's sins, but leaves no doubt that he's acid to all who get close to him, men and women in equal measure, disfiguring, destroying, fatal. Certain gentlemen's sons are no longer received in polite company because of him; there are ladies formerly effusive of his charms who will blanch and leave a dinner if he attends. He owns an unknown number of secrets and deploys them as he pleases. These were the rumors voiced by Basil Hallward, so desperate to hear his idol deny them that he was murdered to keep the secret behind their reality; in Morton Lowry's Adrian Singleton, we see them manifest. Like the classically skilled pianist whose presence in this broken-down sink goes similarly, effectively unexplained, drunken, drawing, bitchy Adrian seems to have slid under the glossy skin of MGM from somewhere sadder and stranger, his matter-of-fact sordid self-despair more chilling than the coyest intimations of Victorian misbehavior. We don't even need any speeches, just the way his self-mocking twist of a smile slips off his face as he looks up at Dorian, that porcelain mask floating in bad lamplight: "I've had too many friends."
The first time I saw The Picture of Dorian Gray, I expected it to have been too badly cramped by the Production Code to pass as even a primer of Wilde; the fact that it surprised me pleasantly otherwise doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws. The score by Herbert Stothart can be crashingly mickey-mousing. However well performed by Cedric Hardwicke, the omniscient narration bewilders me by using almost none of Wilde's text. The little statue of Sekhmet or Bast has a name-checked antecedent in "The Sphinx" (1894) and it's cute of the camera to refer malevolently to it without the characters noticing, but it's still an unnecessary touch of Orientalism in a narrative where the English heart is capable of working the most dreadful enchantments of its own. I can grudgingly accept the substitution of Gladys Hallward for the novel's offstage Hetty Merton, but I can't see Peter Lawford's David Stone as anything other than the most cookie-cutter of obligatory het consolations. I like Hatfield's deathly, smiling immobility, as if he were embalmed within his own youthful image—it may be the coldest portrayal of a sensualist I've ever seen—and I respect the opinion of viewers for whom he comes off as simply stiff. I suspect it works for me in part because the film itself is not so mannered; he's a frozen thing in a living world, especially vivid at the level of the bit players. The gin-mill pianist is Pedro de Cordoba; the prostitutes are Renee Carson and Lilian Bond; Skelton Knaggs creeps around with the drinks and this time around I realized that the street preacher is the ubiquitous Arthur Shields. The murder of Basil Hallward is filmed in slicing expressionist shadows and the blackmailing of Douglas Walton's Alan Campbell is done by daylight the next morning, courteously cruel. Moyna Macgill even turns up at a party. And none of it sticks with me like Adrian Singleton and his sardonic, listing satisfaction at being able to name the man who ruined him. I have never seen another version of the novel and I almost don't want to, knowing none of them will contain him. My apologies to Oscar Wilde. This portrait brought to you by my surpassing backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}