A PICTURE OF POSH CREEPINESS
Dorian Gray almost comes to life, while another portrait reveals tearful self-loathing
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray — the tale of a painted portrait that hideously ages even as its dissolute subject remains forever young — was condemned and censored when first serialised in 1890 and published as a book one year later. Albert Lewin’s 1945 adaptation (new on Blu-ray from Warner Archives) was also poorly received, but not for the same reasons.
Wilde’s novel was attacked as degenerate, Lewin’s movie as stodgy. Writing in US weekly news magazine The Nation, (not Not The Nation) James Agee deemed Dorian dead on arrival; the reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times mocked its “mawkish pomposity”. Manny Farber, who was a painter and an art critic as well as a film writer, was slightly kinder in The New Republic, noting that “the attempt seems to be to give the sensation of reading the book rather than looking at a movie”. This strategy succeeded, he thought, at the cost of paralysing the action.
Erudite as it was, Lewin’s film was something of an anomaly. So was he. A literature professor with a Harvard degree, inspired to go Hollywood by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Lewin broke in as a script reader for Samuel Goldwyn; despite, or perhaps because of, his reputation as an intellectual, he became Irving Thalberg’s trusted lieutenant at MGM, where he served as associate producer on prestige projects like Mutiny
on the Bounty (1935) and The Good Earth (1937). Lewin’s own movies, beginning with his adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1942), were far too obvious in their artistic ambitions.
Posh and creepy, Dorian Gray is as much commentary as adaptation. Contextualising references abound. Wilde is quoted by name; an Aubrey Beardsley drawing may be glimpsed. George Sanders, cast as the Gauguin-like protagonist of The Moon and Sixpence, appears as Lord Henry, first seen clutching a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Sanders, who shares voice-over narration with an uncredited Cedric Hardwicke, is the glibly aphoristic serpent that corrupts the beautiful young Dorian, played by Hurd Hatfield (with an appropriately frozen face). It’s a part Greta Garbo is said to have considered. Her presence might have made the movie an allegory for the ages; still, the role haunted Hatfield for the rest of his career.
A trove of fusty Victorian bric-a-brac, Dorian Gray is not exactly campy, although the décor does on occasion run amok — as with a Balinese dance number that the producer Pandro S Berman evidently cut short. Actually, the movie is something of a horror film.
MGM’s 1941 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a forerunner, and it would not be surprising to find Jack the Ripper,
Count Dracula or the Hound of the Baskervilles skulking around the gas-lit set. (Dorian Gray is a character in the current Showtime series Penny Dreadful.) We never see most of the terrible things that Dorian does — although his betrayal of the singer Sybil Vane (a sweet-faced and dulcet-voiced Angela Lansbury) is crime enough.
The real monster is Dorian’s portrait, a greyish-purplish riot of rot and depravity, commissioned for the movie from Ivan Albright after Lewin considered Salvador Dalí, George Grosz and Pavel Tchelitchew. Otherwise monochromatic, Dorian
Gray bursts into lurid Technicolor whenever this alarming canvas is revealed. In a sense, the rest of the movie is an ornate frame for this macabre image — one that gave its painter his 15 minutes of fame.
PORTRAIT OF JASON
“It seems to me unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted again,” the British art critic John Berger began an essay on portraiture published in the late 1960s. The assertion is questionable, but in any case the nature of portraiture had already been altered by Andy Warhol’s three-minute filmed screen tests and the movies made in their wake, notable among them Shirley Clarke’s 1967 Portrait of Jason. Recently restored and now released by Milestone on Blu-ray and DVD, Clarke’s
Portrait is a 107-minute interview with a self-described hustler and would-be cabaret performer, a 40-ish gay African-American who has taken the name Jason Holliday.
It was filmed over the course of a single night at Clarke’s apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan in December 1966, less than three months after Warhol’s Chelsea Girls had its premiere.
“Holliday comes across as a loquacious raconteur, the kind of amusing and self-amused conversationalist you might be initially happy to trade small talk with at a party,” Manohla Dargis wrote last year in The Times. Jason is at first charmingly shameless; drinking heavily and goaded by the off-screen director and her partner, the actor Carl Lee, his facade ultimately cracks to reveal an abyss of tearful self-loathing.
It’s a psychological Albright canvas — maybe. Lee accuses Holliday of putting on an act, then reverses field: “There’s only one role you can do, Jason, and that’s you.” But wasn’t that the point? Profoundly discomfiting, Portrait exudes ambivalence. Is the filmmaker exploiting her subject’s hunger for recognition, or is he exploiting her need to make a movie?
Extras include audio outtakes, with a confrontation between Clarke and Holliday, as well as Holliday’s unreleased 1967 “comedy album”, which, no less than the movie that facilitated it, serves to showcase his personality and establish the limits of his talent. Clarke herself is interviewed in a 1967 TV news report on Underground New York: “I not only make films, but I live the action of the film,” she explains. The movie is her portrait, as well as Jason’s.