The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) -

An occasionally diverting treatment of the enduringly strange Wilde tale. The scenario is haunting: a fey Victorian dandy makes a soul pact of some kind (here, it seems to be effected through an Egyptian cat statue) which permits him to remain young and beautiful, while a portrait painted of him at the height of his beauty shows all the ravages -- external and internal -- of the life he lives. The story operates at two main registers, both of which seem to be about corruption and the ambivalences of heeding one's "true" nature. On the one hand, we have the story of Dorian Gray and the ways that his fiendish pact for beauty everlasting corrodes his soul; he becomes ugly on the inside because of his single-minded devotion to external beauty. On the other, we have the story as a platform for the standard-issue Wilde character of Lord Wotton (played here by the always annoying George Sanders), the ancillary wag whose task it is to comment wickedly and cynically on the action as it unfolds. Here, Sander's Wotton is like a really nasty Jiminy Cricket for Dorian Gray (played by Hurd Hatfield in a fashion that's not unlike an animatronic wax figure). Because this is MGM, and because this is at the height of the Production Code's certitude, the film struggles a touch to maintain its sense of internal horror and perversity. Basically, the most compelling aspects of the story are glancingly referenced, often in voiceover or "did you hear what happened" kind of episodes. The figure of Dorian Gray is an extraordinary enigma: does his charisma cause folks to reveal their "true" natures to him, thus sealing their doom as he uses the information against them? Or is it something else? Likewise, I'm fascinated by this film's depiction of Dorian Gray as a central figure in the neo-homosexual demimonde of elite England. Basil Hallward's studio is a veritable treasure trove of queer tropes -- in which both Lord Wotton and Dorian remain quite fluent -- and the subsequent suicide of the promising scientist seems tragically, inevitably queer. Indeed, the hint of lurid scandal that haunts Dorian seems all about the gays. However, here, the film carefully frames it -- in aptly Production Code logic -- as Dorian reaping the consequence of his devastation of Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury, in a charming performance). Sibyl is Dorian's first true victim, the conquest through which Dorian "learns" the pleasures of being vicious, and this film depicts Dorian's dissolution as the payback for his destruction of Sibyl. MGM contract players Donna Reed and Peter Lawford are pleasant and appealing as the young lovers nearly caught in Dorian's snare. (Lawford is so CUTE!) But the film struggles a little to sustain the perverse suspense necessary to be a genuine thriller. The film does nice stuff with the gimmick of presenting the portrait in lurid technicolor (while the rest of the piece is lusciously glossed in black/white neo-gothic/noir). I also love the staging of Sibyl Vane's venue -- The Two Turtles -- and the curiously queer aspects of her brother the sailor. I'd love to see a better adaptation of this story, one that really traverses the polymorphous perversity of the narrative while also maintaining a genuine tension (that may or may not be in the source material). A fascinating, if lugubrious, cinematic adaptation of a hauntingly strange narrative.