THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 334, 16 November 1945, Page 18

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

| (M-G-M)

NE of the minor compensations of being a film critic is that you are compelled every now and then to read,

in a hurry, some book tnat you should have read and have wanted to read for years but would probably never have got round to reading without this special obligation to do so, So, fresh from a week-end with Oscar Wilde in the original, I am now in a position to say that M-G-M’s version of his most famous book is, all things considered, by no means a bad translation, though there are probably parts of it that ‘would make Oscar wild, if I may pun so outrageously. One of the things to be considered, of course, is the impossibility of transferring to the screen the curious literary flavour of the novel, so scented, so "precious," so contrived and yet so powerful; and of capturing also the subtle tensions, the psychological nuances, that underlie the outright blood-and-damnation melodrama of the weird tale. On straight shock-tactics the film is fairly strong. I find it quite easy to credit the report that on the evening I was there a woman fainted at the moment when we first saw the transformed portrait of Dorian Gray, loathsome with corruption, crawling with evil, and presented in technicolour to heighten the effect. There are three or four such moments when the film delivers a real punch in the emotional breadbasket, and they lose little of their impact by repetition. But The Picture of Dorian Gray is, or should be, a good deal more than just a cultured shocker, a horror story for grown-ups. And to give the director, Albert Lewin, his due, the film very often is a good deal more than that. Whether or not Oscar Wilde intended it as such, the novel is a rather remarkable morality play, or more precisely a moral fable, about a young man, so enamoured of Youth and his own beauty that he prayed that he might remain always young and beautiful while the portrait of himself which a friend had just painted should grow old instead. His prayer was answered; he embarked | on a deliberate career of vice and sensual indulgence, but, though he apparently gained the whole world, he lost his’ own soul, This theme, though obscured in the film by the emphasis placed on more superficial aspects, is by no means lost sight of. There is a sense in which this is a genuinely religious picture-much more genuinely so than, say, The Keys of the Kingdom or The Song of Bernadette. I certainly do not agree with those few overseas critics who have contended that the picture is namby-pamby in its treatment of spiritual rottenness, being afraid to look the Devil in the face. It is perhaps true that sin does not rear its ugly head quite high enough; that there is too much talk about vice and not enough showing of it; but one has to recognise the difficulty of being explicit in these matters, especially with the Hays Office looking on. And even Oscar himself was very

discreet in describing his rake’s proe gress: he left it mostly to our imaginations. I would agree, however, that the director missed one great opportunity of exploiting his cinematic medium: when Dorian went out to wallow in his nameless orgies, we in the audience should have been conducted up to the attic to watch the portrait growing in vileness and obscenity before our eyes. * * * (CONSIDERING everything, as I say, I don’t think Albert Lewin has made such a bad job of Dorian Gray. He has given us a very convincing fin de siécle period atmosphere; he has left the broad outline of the story very much as it was written and included a surprising number of the details; he has even given us large portions of the actual text, spoken by an off-screen narrator (a rather annoying device this is in some ways because it slows up the action, but it certainly adds to the literary quality of the film); and what is more he’gives us every one of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams that is worth repeating. As uttered by George Sanders in the character of Lord Henry Wotton, that dissolute but highly intelligent dilettante who is Dorian’s evil genius, these epigrams simple rattle off the screen, like handfuls of peas thrown at a windowpane, and sometimes they have the same tinkling sound, All the same, I think they are even more effective spoken than read, and it is worth recording that the audience appreciates them. George Sanders probably takes more of the camera’s attention than anybody else-he certainly dominates the sound track-and while I can think of one or two others who might have done the part better, and given it greater depth, it is a reasonably satisfactory performance, I would say the same of Hurd Hatfield’s work as Dorian. It was, I suspect, a comparatively easy role to play: what Hatfield mostly has to do is to look superbly handsome and boyishly innocent, and Nature did that for him when she gave him his face. The really difficult acting in Dorian’s role is left to the portrait*, which has to show the evidence of debauchery, while Hatfield himself goes through the film with a virtually expressionless countenance which ultimately becomes monotonous, The best ‘piece of casting in the whole film is Lowell Gilmore as Basil Hallward and he also, I think, gives the most satisfying performance of all as the artist who paints Dorian with so much affection and is later murdered by his model. Haliward represents the principle of light in this chronicle of darkness, and, while the film fails to bring out fully the ethical antagonism which this implies, Gilmore makes the artist a man you can believe in as well as like. * * * ALBERT LEWIN was the director who made that remarkably adult picture The Moon and Sixpence, and I want to give him full credit for the way he has wrestled with even more difficult material here. But the man I should *A series of canvases were painted for M.G.M. by the "terrible twins," Ivan and Malvin Albright, who visited insane asylums, alcoholic wards, and hospitals for the "incurably diseased in order to get local colour.

have liked to see tackle Dorian Gray was Val Lewton, who makes those fascinating little so-called "horror films" for RKO and who has shown himself such a genius at giving a genuinely literary quality to supernatural themes. He would, I think, have handled this subject more simply and with fewer compromises. After all, when you embark on such a really tough enterprise as this you might as well recognise from the start the futility of trying to play to the gallery. Some of Lewin’s concessions to Hollywood convention and allegedly "popular" taste I can sympathise with, and some of his amendments are actually an improvement on the original. For instance, Sybil Vane, Dorian’s first victim, becomes a genuine little period piece when played by Angela Lansbury (old George’s grand-daughter). Not only the character of the girl herself but the whole situation surrounding her carries more conviction in the film than in the book, especially the scene where Dorian puts her virtue to the test and then destroys it. But why drag in the statuette of the cat, "one of the 73 great gods of Egypt," as the malevolent agent in the story: can’t a movie audience stomach the idea of a young man selling his soul to the devil without some such direct symbolism? This is to reduce an ingenious fantasy to the level of hocus-pocus. And again, it is unadulterated Hollywood, and the worst thing in the whole picture, to introduce a pseudo-heroine in the form of the little niece of Basil Hallward and

have her grow up to fall in love with the unageing Dorian, and he with her, with the result that this miserable, utterly damned sinner comes dangerously near (dangerously near for the story’s sake) to redeeming himself by his noble renunciation of her fresh young beauty. The real Dorian had no such scruples; when he did spare one girl-a village maiden, incidentally, not a high-born lady-he did it simply to feed his ¥anity and to give himself a new sensation; his renunciation was pure hypocrisy and the portrait in the attic showed no change for the better, And when he stabbed the knife into the portrait and so killed himself, he did so not because he wanted to lead a better life but because he hoped to destroy his own conscience. You can’t give a story like The Picture of Dorian Gray a happy ending; and it was absurd, and might have been fatal, to make even a slight move in that direction. Still, it is something that the film was made at all. Whatever its defects, Dorian Gray is an attempt, and a not wholly unsuccessful one, to produce a film which will appeal at least as much to the intellect as to the emotions.