Oooh, Witches and Homosexuals!  *my* kind of people...

G.

Hey Jennifer, can I get hunk intern Chris Jennings to give me a total body exam? wait, don't let me trip over my own trousers as I fumble to remove them!!!

suddenly, I'm just loving the American medical system!

xoxo G.

That was a good review.  I personally find the Curtis Dorian Gray top-knotch, well acted television drama.  Some profess to find the adaptation boring or kitsch, but I like Davenport and Briant the best of any of those who have essayed the key roles of Lord Henry and Dorian.  I think the production would have worked even better had Basil been more the way he was in the book.  The adaptation made him too hetero (and cast him with an actor who was about 10 years too old for the part) and more taken with Dorian's innocence than his startling physical perfection. In the book, in which Basil was a throwback to the male-focused artistic ideals of ancient Athens.

I don't agree with Robert Osbourne though that the publication of Dorian Gray started Wilde's legal troubles.  The book came out first in magazine form in 1889 or 1890.  And I think the cloth publication was in 1890 or 1891.  Wilde's legal difficulties resulted from his relationship with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.  Although readers of a later time often assume that Dorian is a projection of Wilde's troubled paramour, in reality Dorian was inspired by John Gray, a conflicted aesthetic poet who flirted with Wilde for a time in the late 1880s.  I don't believe Wilde and Douglas met until around 1892.

Bosie Douglas' papa, the notorious "Scarlett Marquis," the Marquis of Queensberry (an enthusiast of pugilism), was outraged by Wilde's antics with his son. Wilde actually wanted to be more discreet--Bosie manipulated his lover to push the envelope in order to get at his father, whom he hated.  All this is ably dramatized in the Stephen Frye vehicle, Wilde (in which Jude Law portrays Lord Alfred Douglas very much as the vitriolic monster depicted in Wilde's own prison memoir, De Profundis, and also Andre Gide's If it die not, which deserves to be more widely read).

For comparison, I recommend the 1970 Helmut Berger vehicle, Dorian Gray, with Herbert Lom as Lord Henry Wotton.  In this version, the story was updated to the milieu of the late Sixties and decadent, Swinging London, and the gay aspects were made somewhat more explicit, considerably more so than in the Dan Curtis version.

Gothick

Hey Julia, I have to wonder whether Grayson demanded sleeves on the housekeeper's uniform dress.  It's very odd that it was short sleeved that one day.  I thought she looked better that way, as well.  She may have felt that her arms were too skinny.

I also liked the necklace.  It suited her.

xo  Steve

OK, am I going out of my mind, or has the quality of Sci Fi's DS feed gone waaaayyyy below par???

I had the show on both yesterday and today.  Yesterday's viewing was very brief, but it looked, in the scene between Carolyn Loomis and Daniel in Angelique's room, as if someone had smeared brylcreem all over the camera lens (hmmm... maybe Buzz was visiting the studio that day?)  I don't remember this problem on my tape of that episode.

And on today's show, I noticed instantly that the feed looked grainy and washed out, compared to my MPI tape.  This was during today's second show, which is one of my favorite episodes in all DS, and I've viewed my own tape of it many times.   I found myself wondering whether the source material for the broadcasts is low grade copies of the masters rather than a higher quality thingamujig?

I know NAHSSINGK (bellowed with Magda Rakosi elan) about technical details of today's television broadcasts, but I notice that TV Land always maintains a high quality image when they run old shows, and I don't understand why Sci Fi can't do the same for DS.  I guess it may be the only Sixties show they are running now, so perhaps they just don't care anymore.  (Come to think of it, on TV Land's Bewitched marathon, one of the Dick Sargent era--ca. 1970 shows ran as a blurry, grainy film copy, where clearly no one had bothered to strike a new print of the episode for whatever reason.)

btw, when they were running that TACKY Stargate promo DURING the start of Act One, and acidic schmutz was belching all over Carolyn and Barnabas, I really felt the programmers were adding insult to injury!

Makes me profoundly grateful I don't rely upon Sci Fi for my DS viewing...

G.

Vlad!  I saw this topic a few days back, but stupidly thought you were talking about the Lara Parker flick, Race for the Devil.  I wish I had realized you were talking about Eye of the Devil; I'd have had a friend tape it for me.  I used to have a tape of it (from an AMC showing of many years ago, back when they aired movies without commercial interruption) but loaned it to a friend who never returned it, and who is no longer in contact.

Interestingly I have an old magazine (from around 1965) that has a publicity article on the making of Eye of the Devil, or 13 as it was then known.  When I finally got to see it, I thought it was a real gem.  Niven, Kerr, and Flora Robson all shine in their respective roles.  I thought David Hemmings and Sharon Tate were both remarkable in what they were given to do.  I think Tate had real promise.  It's a shame she met Roman Polanski and moved to Hollywood. I have a bizarre fondness for Tate's performance in Valley of the Dolls.  Edith Efron (the evil beeyotch who wrote a nasty article about Grayson in TV guide) interviewed Tate for an infamous Look magazine spread on Dolls and implied that Tate was a brainless bimbo.

So far as I know, Eye of the Devil is not available on video or DVD.  It's a pity, because I think it is a beautifully crafted film.  It is really a mood piece that evokes the inner power that lives within the Earth, and how people in traditional communities hold that power and the sacrifices they make to honor that strength and to allow their communities to survive.  It was of course far too thoughtful and unusual a film to achieve any real critical recognition, then or now.

I'll bet David Niven and Deborah Kerr wish this had become better known than Casino Royale, a fun fluffy film they did together shortly after this.

Best wishes,

Steve

Guys--it was the Sixties!!  Just have a look at old fashion mags from the period.  They seldom got into the really outrageous stuff on Dark Shadows, like the little pearls pasted under the eyelids, or the extra-curl false eyelashes.

The same goes for the hair.  I was just watching I Dream of Jeannie last weekend.  What went on with Barbara Eden's hairpieces on that show makes Angelique's PT 1970 hair look quite restrained by comparison!

I'm now totally confused about what topics belong here.  I would have thought this topic would have belonged on current chat?  I've basically given up trying to understand.  As dear Grayson once comment, "Who can figure anything?"  Definitely applies to these boards.

Love to all, Gothick

I actually love that dress because it is so HORRIFYING!

what is a hoot is that it was at least 3 years old at this point. She wore it in the infamous 1967 seance episode.

It's kind of like seeing Grayson's most horrible outfits from 1968 resurface in the Summer 1970 sequence.

Steve