IF there were more effort than there is to translate Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” into movie language rather than that of the theatre and the novel, it would probably equal the horror of a dozen of the kind Universal makes with Boris Karloff. The story credits itself with going through the entire dictionary of pleasure, evil and corruption, and the moral consequences of each act are explored thoroughly either in their effect on Dorian Gray, on the people who are ruined by getting close to him, or on the portrait of him which records the corruption of his soul while he remains young and unblemished. Albert Lewin’s new movie (with Hurd Hatfield as Dorian and George Sanders as Lord Henry) is a reverent transference that works much less on the disquieting elements of the story than it does on drawing-room talk, Chopin music and a pretty ballad called “Little Yellow Bird” which is sung by Dorian’s first sweetheart (Angela Lansbury) very tellingly. Also, the flavor of it is a corny, romantic one that usually turns up in films about pirates or in woodcuts for the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The movie evades most of Dorian’s excursions into “the dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields,” but it does make one trip into one abyss, which is a cute, toylike house of prostitution where a nice old broken-down romantic plays Chopin on a grand piano and the prostitutes talk like Inquiring Reporters. Of all the trouble people have when they get with Dorian the movie only works on Dorian’s murder of the artist, Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore), who helped Dorian into evil by painting such a good picture of him. This scene is pretty good, but the horror is evaporated by your not being able to locate anything in the shadows, and by a chandelier which swings back and forth hysterically but with unlikely energy. MGM treats Dorian’s portrait (painted for the movie by the Albright twins), which I think should be examined very closely, and especially so while in the process of corruption, as it treated the steeplechase in “National Velvet”—mostly by looking at its spectators. It is hard to make out the corruption, because there is so much of it and all of the same value; but the main difficulty is that you don’t get to watch it grow. You are given a longer view of it in its original state (painted for the movie by Henrique Medina) and a more satisfactory one, so that the corruption has less weight than it should.
Lewin’s treatment has the three-times-removed, fancy quality that MGM treatments generally have, but it does some good work, and has, after all, the Wilde story to work on, which is a more exciting, ingenious, cinematic, confusing and witty one than, say, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” The notes in it that go against MGM’s grain (its esthetic and moral arguing, or the pleasure Dorian gets out of his sins, or all the moral complexities Wilde attached to Dorian’s relationship to his portrait) are played very lightly, if at all, and the ones that go with it (the singing and piano-playing) are made too much of. But my impression is that it gives a fair idea of the Wilde story and is well worth seeing. The movie makes an adequate stab at registering the purity of Dorian’s youth by a soft lighting of his face and by Hatfield’s attempts at radiance, and it makes an exceptional stab at registering the sweetness and innocence of his sweetheart (Miss Lansbury is very fine). The first change that takes place on the portrait seemed to me a very sensitive, judicious bit of painting, and I was impressed by the use of a butterfly to symbolize Dorian’s character falling under Lord Henry’s domination. But I think this symbol, and the many others that are used—such as a dagger cleaving a boyhood carving of a heart—are employed as if the audience would have difficulty recognizing them, and as though the movie were duty bound to use symbols, being a work of art.
The attempt seems to be to give the sensation of reading the book rather than looking at a movie, and I think it succeeds to a certain extent, anyway sufficiently to paralyze the movie. The characters talk as though they were reading from the novel, in stiff, fleshless voices, scenes are immobilized and edited so that they look more like book illustrations than movie life, faces are made masklike, and there is a great deal of irritating off-screen narration by Sir Cedric Hardwicke that works in the nature of a lantern-slide lecture.
March 19, 1945