Albert Lewin (1945)
I think I’d seen it only once before – in my teens (I read the novel a few years later). A few things had always stayed with me: the main characters’ names, the waxen handsomeness of Hurd Hatfield in the title role, the portrait in its later stages of corruption, and – especially – the melody of the song ‘Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird’ and the way Angela Lansbury (as Sybil Vane , the vaudeville performer whom Dorian courts and then destroys) sings it. Seeing the film again makes me understand why I remembered these things but there’s much more to admire. Because George Sanders’ character range was narrow, his skill in playing witty cads is greatly underrated: as Lord Henry Wotton, the languidly baleful influence on Dorian, Sanders dispatches the epigrams in a way that both gives them maximum impact and sounds completely natural to the character. Lord Henry is innately a verbal showoff but Sanders understands – and has the technique to prove triumphantly – that showing off needn’t mean ‘theatrical’ pointing up of the relentlessly brilliant lines, which so often makes listening to Wilde a gruelling experience. Sanders brings out the hard core of Lord Henry’s cynicism so that – when Dorian’s heartless sensualism has begun to cause real harm but the aphorisms keep coming – your laughter is withheld.
The gradually repellent effect of the witty words is achieved – to a minor extent – by Hurd Hatfield too. Although he seems very wooden at the start, there are later hints that he’s trying for something subtle in his tiny flickers of emotional sensitivity. His face is beautifully immobile to such a degree that it does, whether or not through the actor’s skill, realise in a highly effective way the central idea of Dorian’s looks not changing while the picture-in-the-attic expresses his increasing moral degeneration. For much of the time, Hatfield is so lacking in animation that he truly does seem to have swapped places with his portrait. Angela Lansbury gives an unforgettable performance – in the fusion of Sybil Vane’s poise as a performer and the crystalline sweetness of her singing voice, in her sensuous bloom, which overwhelms a streak of common sense, as she falls in love with Dorian. When Sybil receives his letter rejecting her, Lansbury is calmly, gravely undemonstrative – it makes the news of Sybil’s death a few minutes later all the more poignant.
This makes Dorian Gray sound a lot less enjoyable than it actually is (it’s also more eventful that I’d remembered). There are some effects which don’t work. The insertion of colour shots of the portrait into the black-and-white photography (which won an Oscar for Harry Stradling) look clumsy today. The closing shot of Dorian’s death’s head – once the portrait has regained its youth and his body has reabsorbed his depravity – must have been as much a risible horror-film anti-climax then as it is now. But, for the most part, this is an exciting as well as a richly entertaining supernatural melodrama. Hurd Hatfield’s virtual disappearance from the screen within a few years means that he’s frozen in this part for ever – that obviously gives a retrospective edge to watching him, particularly given Wilde’s theme and plot. There are others too who (as far as I know) were rarely if ever heard of again (no great surprise in that – although they’re not bad here): Lowell Gilmore (as the portrait painter), Richard Fraser (Sybil’s would-be avenging brother), Douglas Walton (as a man whom Dorian blackmails into disposing of a corpse), Morton Lowry (striking as a dissipated friend of Dorian, who hangs out after dark in the same lowlife locale). Two members of the cast who certainly were heard of again are Donna Reed, as the painter’s daughter, and Peter Lawford, who looks distinctively normal in this company, as her suitor.
1 October 2008
