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From 1945 comes one of the best adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Remarkably we get a dry and witty George Sanders (Addison DeWitt in All About Eve), a 20-year-old Angela Lansbury (Murder, She Wrote), an equally young Donna Reed (The Donna Reed Show), and fabulous Oscar-winning photography mixing black and white with a little splash of color for effect when they show the painting. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a unique fantasy horror film that could easily slip into your collection next to the moody Universal monster classics, but containing more subtlety and wit to write it off as merely a creature feature. The story revolves around a man who sells his soul for eternal youth. He has a painting made that will age instead of him, and all of his sins will be wrought on the image of his visage in oil. He adopts a libertine immoral code, and loses all compassion and anything truly good about being human. Dorian transforms in to a young dashing beautiful monster.
The film follows Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield, King David) in 1886 as he has a portrait painted of himself and wishes to the heavens to sell his soul in exchange for never-ending youth. Somehow Gray’s wish comes true, and his soul ends up in the painting, which will now age instead of him. Dorian is a concert pianist, and he engages in philosophical discussions with Lord Wotton (Sanders) who speaks of beauty as being important for its own sake removed from morality and religion. Dorian begins to test the waters and his friend Wotton’s theories by entering in a cruel and destructive relationship with a vaudeville singer named Sybil Vane (Lansbury). He seduces her, and then says he resents her for falling for his machinations. This crushes the young beauty, and she ends up taking her own life out of devastation. Dorian becomes more and more callous and decadent, and he locks the painting up in his attic. His life begins to spiral down in to living only for the sake of beauty and pleasure, and Gray finds himself a mere shell without anything to keep him in check while the painting turns uglier and uglier. He is beautiful but his life is ugly beyond imagination.
Where Dr. Jekyll turned in to the hideously deformed Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray retains his good looks even though he has no soul. Wilde’s premise is kept intact for the movie translation written and directed by Albert Lewin. The novel’s author was fascinated by the Robert Louis Stevenson tale, but he wanted to apply his own “dandified” spin on the proceedings for his version of a Gothic horror story. Wilde was unabashedly homosexual, and fans of the novel’s homoeroticism may find this 1945 The Picture of Dorian Gray lacking in truly scandalous aspects. But the film does get the mood and essence of the story down pat, even if it does have to adhere to the strict moral codes placed on movies of the time. It’s almost a pity the film couldn’t have been made a decade earlier when the film world was allowed to be more kinky. It’s all not nearly as macabre as it could be, but there is a nice idea about “is beauty enough” running through the film to make it interesting and to qualify it as a classic. Ironically the production is so beautiful it doesn’t capture the uglier sides of the novel.
Albert Lewin - (1945) The Picture of Dorian Gray.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 50 min
Size: 2.28 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 784x576
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 2 573 kb/s
BPP: 0.238
Audio
#1: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
#2: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Cast commentaries by Angela Lansbury and film historian/screenwriter Steve Haberman)
https://nitro.download/view/005CB1559B3966C/Albert_Lewin_-_(1945)_The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
The post Albert Lewin – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.