# Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1945)

### reviewed by
David Dalgleish

    THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

"We suffer for what the gods give us, and I'm afraid Dorian Gray will pay for his good looks."

    3.5 out of ****

Starring Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, Basil Hallward Written & Directed by Albert Lewin Cinematography by Harry Stradling

Of all Oscar Wilde's works, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY was surely the one that most easily accomodated a Hollywood adaption in the 1940s. Hollywood, then as now, likes neat conclusions, preferably moral ones--and dislikes subversive ironies. DORIAN GRAY, Wilde's only novel, can be taken at face value (and not to its detriment) as an exemplary conte morale, with a neatly symmetrical finale. There are subversive ironies distorting the smoothly polished narrative surface, but, while they enrich our enjoyment, they are not necessary to it. It could make a fine movie, and it did.

The story, for those who came in late, concerns Dorian Gray, a young fin-de-siècle Adonis who, looking upon a recently finished portait of himself, idly wishes that the painting would age, absorbing by proxy time's decay, while he would stay young and beautiful. And, for reasons that are never explained and don't really matter anyway, his wish is granted. No matter what he does, he retains an air of youthful innocence that makes it difficult for anyone to believe ill of him. This, in effect, gives him free license to commit all manner of debauchery, most of it merely hinted at: he becomes engaged, then rather cruelly dismisses his fiancée, prompting her suicide; he frequents opium dens; he indulges in scandalous affairs. But as with all granted wishes, there is a catch: no longer subject to the indignities of human mortality, Dorian loses touch with the dignity of human morality.

Playing a Wilde-scripted role can be tricky: there is more than a hint of smugness in his epigrammatic, paradoxical wit, and in the wrong hands, it can become self-congratulatory, every line becoming a paraphrase of "look, aren't I ever so clever?" DORIAN GRAY has fewer pitfalls than his stage comedies, though, because almost all the typically Wildean lines go to Lord Henry Wootton, an aristocrat who becomes a kind of mentor to Dorian, schooling him in the ways of refined amorality. (It is his cruelly conceived "test" that prompts Dorian's fiancée, Sybil Vane, to commit suicide.) Lord Henry is played by a perfectly cast George Sanders, whose droll and oh-so-sophisticatedly world-weary performance seems like a dress rehearsal for his later role as Addison de Witt in ALL ABOUT EVE. He anchors the film; he does Wilde proud.

Hurd Hatfield's Dorian is stiff, emotionless, almost robotic. Although this is intended to convey Dorian's soullessness, it is perhaps too straightforward an interpretation, a minimalist reduction of the complex and contradictory impulses that torment the man. Angela Lansbury's performance has an altogether different problem. Her Sybil Vane is good, sweet, nice, respectable, and exceedingly dull: she seems to be acting in a different film entirely. Lansbury can be great in quirky roles (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES) but she founders here, playing the femme douce to Dorian's heartless roué.

But, if my memory of the novel is correct, this is how Wilde wrote her in the first place, and the fault then lies with him. He believed in his bitchy men and catty women more thoroughly than he ever believed in an innocent like Sybil Vane. (No wonder he killed her off so early). Elsewhere, the script likewise remains faithful to the text. The homoeroticism is, of course, carefully elided, but the necessary time dilation and plot excisions are well-handled--if anything, the story becomes neater, more incisive, pared of the novel's occasional longeurs. Lewin embellishes the original tale with some flourishes that echo and elaborate--perhaps a trifle too obviously--the motifs of beauty and entrapment: Lord Wootton drowns a butterfly in a dish of water; Sybil Vane sings of a bird in a cage of gold.

When Dorian's moral free-fall reaches its nadir, he commits murder. D.P. Harry Stradling--whose work is masterful throughout--makes this the film's most memorable moment: during the struggle, the victim's hand dashes an overhead light, which sets to swinging violently, sending shadow and light chasing each other throughout the cloistral room. Dorian, expressionless, is momentarily, hallucinatorily, backdropped by a blank wall, against which brightness and darkness shift restlessly, irreconcilable. This chiaroscuro image is a marvellously apt picture of Dorian Gray, a man whose soul is as divided from his self as light is from dark, and emblematic of the movie as a whole, which cuts to the quick of Wilde's novel while retaining all its wit, its contradictions, its ageless lessons.

    A Review by David Dalgleish (December 1st, 1998)
            dgd@intouch.bc.ca

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