DC DVD Review #1 - "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Here is the first of 2 reviews of Dan Curtis movies coming to DVD, both to appear in Filmfax #97 which will be available next week.  The issue, which can be ordered at www.filmfax.com or found at Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, and other comic/sci-fi shops, will also feature interviews with DC as well as KLS and Lara Parker.  The review is posted here with permission of the author, David Nahmod.


"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1974) MPI Home Video, $14.98. 111 minutes.
This 1974 production, shot on video for TV, is the latest of several
post Dark Shadows projects of Dan Curtis to be released on DVD.
Dorian Gray is perhaps the most famous book written by the legendary
author/actor/humorist Oscar Wilde. Wilde, who did jail time in the 1890s
for the "crime" of being gay, often wrote of that era's hypocrisy,
usually in a humorous vein. Dorian was a far cry from his usual
lightheartedness.
Now considered a "horror classic", Gray is in fact a morality fable.
It's a tale Dan Curtis was most familiar with. In 1969 he did a loose
adaptation of it on Dark Shadows. Werewolf Quentin Collins (David Selby)
was cured of his lycanthropy through a magical portrait that turned into
a werewolf in his place. The portrait did double duty. Like Dorian Gray,
Quentin did not age, the portrait did. But unlike the Gray story,
Quentin Collins went from being a cad to a sexy, 100 year old anti-hero.
This production returns to the specifics of the Wilde tale. It is the
best of the three classic tales that Curtis produced for late night TV
in the 1970s.
As he usually does when presenting a classic horror tale, Curtis relies
exclusively on Robert Cobert's famed Dark Shadows score. This always
works well. Cobert's orchestrations are richly eerie. Curtis' tradition
of featuring former Dark Shadows cast members in small roles is in
evidence here with the presence of the wonderful character actor John
Karlen. Karlen has made a splash twice in the horror genre, as Dark
Shadows' Willie Loomis, and in the unusual, highly regarded cult film
"Daughters of Darkness" (1971).
Being shot on video, Dorian Gray cannot escape it's made for TV roots.
Having said that, let me also say that it is very well done. Cast
primarily with highly recognizable British character actors, it is
flawlessly performed. Nigel Davenport is wonderfully menacing as the
manipulative, sarcastic Lord Henry Wotton, possibly an alter ego to
Wilde. He greatly enjoys making witty quips about society's hypocrisies.
He also takes great pride in having influenced young Dorian to live a
life of sin and sleaze.
Shane Briant as Dorian is well cast. A 1970s "pretty boy", Briant's
full, sensual lips, wavy blonde hair and bedroom eyes succeeds in
convincing that his beauty and demeanor could first enchant, then repel
everyone he meets. Briant, who starred in several Hammer films,
continues to act in British theatre and television to this day. He's
more than just a pretty face. He can act. When Dorian watches his
portrait both age in his place and reveal the sins of his soul, his fear
is convincing.
This Dorian Gray is able to touch upon themes considered taboo when MGM
filmed the story in 1945. That production, though well made and acted,
could not show Dorian sinking to the depths of the depravity he sinks to
in the Curtis version. Nor could a 1945 film allude to Dorian's sexual
escapades with men. Though in 2002 many may take offense to the newer
film's implication that merely indulging in gay sex indicates depravity.
Shot both in studio and at several English townhouses, the sets and
costumes are authentic and well appointed. The lighting is imaginative,
creating a "dark shadowy" atmosphere that makes the production feel more
like a horror film than a morality fable. Though slow and talky in
parts, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is a well made piece that fans of
Dan Curtis' work and Oscar Wilde's story will enjoy.
Being a made for TV film, this is of course a full screen presentation.
Color, sound and print quality are clear and sharp. The only extras
beyond chapter search are a Spanish language track and English
subtitles.
One final historical footnote: When the 1945 version was screened on TCM
recently, host Robert Osborne pointed out that it was the publication of
this story that set Oscar Wilde's legal troubles in motion. All the
"sexual depravity" in the story tipped Victorian audiences off that
Wilde might not have been adhering to the era's code of conduct.

--------David Nahmod

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

Gothick is partially right, I think.

The affair with Douglas got Wilde convitced and sent to jail, a sad story brilliantly told in the 1997 film "Wilde".

But it was the publication of Dorian Gray that gave the Victorian Morality Police reason to pay more attention to Wilde.

The 1970 version of the story, while
not the best version, is closest to Wilde "in spirit" because the gay angle was so graphic. In the Curtis version it was merely implied. 

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've read some of John Gray's poetry and really liked it.  I used his poem about working at a forge (he had a working class background) as a comparison with Pip's work at the forge in "Great Expectations" for a teaching plan I prepared (but which I will never be teaching -- slight change in plans).  I've wanted to read more of his poetry but I think it is difficult to obtain.  I was, however, rather aghast at the way he was portrayed, very briefly (by Ioan Gruffudd) in "Wilde," since I had read a biography of him which did not lead one to view him as the "boy-toy" of the movie version.

Apparently "Bosie" Douglas was also a very highly regarded poet of that era, and I liked what little I read of his work, too.

All before Pound and Eliot changed the poetry landscape forever.

Hi Vlad, if you can find it, there is a very useful book called Sexual Heretics, edited by Brian Reade and published in 1970, that reprinted a lot of these 1890s poets who challenged the literary orthodoxy of the day with their daring queer subject-matter (and often explored obscure fixed forms in a fascinatingly creative way--Ezra Pound, of course, had complete contempt for any poet who worked in fixed forms).

I wonder whether the portrayal of Gray in the Wilde film may have been based upon the account of Gray in a very gossipy book by Rupert Croft-Cooke, Feasting with Panthers.  Croft-Cooke also wrote a book about Wilde's sex life that was loaded with salacious anecdotes about folks like John Gray and his very twisted lover, Andre Raffalovich.

As for Bosie Douglas, I don't think he was ever taken very seriously as a poet, though he desperately wished to be.  Some of his poems do stand up surprisingly well, but at the time, with his title and his privileged background, everyone in London simply regarded him as a spoiled dilletante riding on O. W.'s coat-tails.

Sadly, Bosie grew more embittered and vitriolic as time went on, and he made life for Wilde's executor, the saintly Robbie Ross, as difficult as possible.

Excuse all this natter, maybe something here of interest,

G.

I wonder whether the portrayal of Gray in the Wilde film may have been based upon the account of Gray in a very gossipy book by Rupert Croft-Cooke, Feasting with Panthers.  Croft-Cooke also wrote a book about Wilde's sex life that was loaded with salacious anecdotes about folks like John Gray and his very twisted lover, Andre Raffalovich.

Interesting, too, that John Gray became Fr. John Gray, a much respected Catholic priest and canon (not sure if I'm right about that term as I know little about Catholicism).

One of his books of poetry I was interested in was called "Silverpoints," and I think he may also have written a play (or possibly short story) that sounded interesting.

I'm pretty sure that at one time Lord Alfred "Bosie" had some poems included in anthologies.

Regarding the Dan Curtis production of "Dorian Gray," I have viewed this twice but it has been quite a while ago.  My feeling was that I would recommend it to someone who was very interested in the book, but maybe not to the casual viewer -- largely because of it being a videotaped filming.  Rather an interesting choice for a late-night TV offerring ... I think this may have been about the same time as "Frankenstein: The True Story" (scripted by Christopher Isherwood) which was produced on film and with a far more luxurious budget.

I remember thinking that the final scene where his wife (!) goes up the stairs was rather a dud.  She begins by rushing up the stairs, then unaccountably slows down, apparently for no other reason than to "build suspense."  (Unfortunately, it didn't.)

There was a lot of dialogue taken directly from the novella, I think, and I agree with the review that the sets and costumes appeared very authentic.  I thought the portraits compared favorably with the Ivan Albright ones of the original movie, but I could be wrong.

 

Filmfax #97 ... will be available next week.  The issue, which can be ordered at www.filmfax.com or found at Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, and other comic/sci-fi shops, will also feature interviews with DC as well as KLS and Lara Parker.

Kosmo13 shared his comments about those interviews on one of the DS posting boards on scifi.com, and here's a direct link to it:

http://bboard.scifi.com/bboard/browse.cgi/1/1/1966/175