A Film Canon

 

 

This striking adaptation represents one of the few moments in the cinema at which an intrusive, omnipresent narration seems appropriate, since it increasingly coincides with Dorian's (Hurd Hatfield) actions in such a way as to rob him of any interiority, reducing him to the beautiful automaton that Wilde envisaged. That said, Hatfield's maintenance of the same chiselled expression for the duration of the film, combined with Harry Stradling's deep-focus cinematography, tends to construe Dorian as a statue, rather than a painting. Hence Cedric Gibbons' ingenious art direction, which ensures both that every scene has at least one statue or frieze in the background (and generally several), and that these gradually move from a classical (especially Grecian) to oriental (especially Egyptian) register. Not only does this imbue Dorian's beauty with an increasing uncanniness, but it suggests that the distinction between his aestheticism, and painter Basil Hallward's (Lowell Gilmore) Buddhism is a false one; or, alternatively, that aestheticism is merely honest, rather than indulgent. In the same way, the selective use of Technicolour sculpts the portrait itself into a lurid three-dimensionality, while satisfying the novel's deeper, more subversive implication that even the grotesque, or horrifying, represents an aesthetic pleasure - albeit a more difficult one - such that Dorian's moral discovery is ultimately subsumed into his contemplation of the superlative beauty of death, of his own death. The one weakness is George Sanders' portrayal of Lord Henry Wotton which, while occasionally achieving the camp ambiguity of his original, frequently feels like a mere catalogue of Wilde witticisms, as well as an explication of their more mechanical, predictable qualities.