The Picture of Dorian Gray

I know it's a shame, but although I knew the basic content, I had never actually read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and I had never seen an adaptation of it, either.
So I welcomed the movie from 1945 being part of Lisa's Summer of Angela on Boondock Ramblings. Maybe I'll even try to read the book - Oscar Wilde's only novel - eventually.

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The plot ((partial) spoiler alerts for some, but probably not for all).

Lord Henry Wotton visits his friend Basil Hallward, a painter. There he meets the young, handsome aristocrat Dorian Gray who poses for Hallward. He convinces him that only youth is worth having and Dorian makes a wish in presence of an ancient cat statue, the wish that his portrait should age instead of himself.
Inspired by Wotton's words to enjoy his youth, Dorian turns to the half-world where he meets the tavern singer Sibyl whom he falls in love with and even wants to marry although her brother James, a sailor, isn't happy about it at all.
Wotton recommends to put her to the test, when she doesn't react to Dorian's liking, he breaks off the engagement.
The next day he regrets it, but it's too late, Sibyl has killed herself. Hallward is shocked at Dorian's callousness when he brings him the news.
Afterwards, Dorian notices for the first time that the painting has changed and he hides it away from others.

For years, Dorian is leading a life full of vanity, pleasure and sin, but he never changes which makes people suspect and avoid him. The painting, however, is showing a hideous creature by now.
One day he shows Hallward the painting, but then murders him to keep the secret, and blackmails his friend Campbell into disposing of the body for him. Campbell can't bear the guilt and kills himself.
Then Dorian asks Hallward's niece Gladys to marry him.
Sibyl's brother comes home after many years in which he has tried to find the man who is to blame for his sister's death. Following him to his country estate, he gets accidentally shot during a hunting party.

Dorian realizes he can only save Gladys from similar misfortune by leaving her. He breaks off the engagement by letter and seeing a small change for the better in the painting he hopes to overcome the spell by stabbing it.
When the blade hits the painting, however, he screams terribly and falls over. His friends find him dead in front of the painting, turned into the hideous creature while the painting once again shows the young handsome Dorian.

Painting by Henrique Medina,
now believed to be in a private collection

First of all, let me say that I don't know what exactly I did expect Dorian to look like (I didn't know he was described as blond with blue eyes and very emotional in the book, for example). Maybe I thought of someone classically handsome (whatever that means), someone more angelic exuding innocence, someone "shining", whatever, but not Hurd Hatfield. It nagged me just a tiny bit all the way through the movie.
It also made me wonder how I would have imagined Dorian if I had read the book first.

Dorian didn't show much emotion throughout the movie and that was what Albert Lewin wanted. It can't have been easy for Hatfield to keep that up, but Lewin wanted his face to be like a mask. He even shot closeups in the morning, so Hatfield wouldn't look tired (you should see me in the morning, that would definitely not work) and stopped filming with him at 4 p.m.
So the transformation of Dorian from an innocent young man to a man with a rotten soul has to be shown merely through his sins - of which we only get a few to see, however, so we can let our fantasy run wild - and his eyes, and I think Hatfield did that really well which also helped me mostly getting over his looks, actually before I knew this was Levin's intention.

George Sanders made a great Henry. He's elegant, witty, and utterly unlikeable. Yet it's not hard to understand how someone like he would be able to corrupt a young man like Dorian although even Henry seems to be surprised at how quickly and deeply Dorian's transformation is going.
I don't understand that well why Basil is friends with him, but I've seen it in books before, a villain having a good friend, good in every sense of the word, probably hoping for the villain to mend their ways eventually.
What annoyed me about Basil was that he didn't really seem to try to counter Henry's bad influence with anything but telling Dorian not to listen to him. From someone who was obviously in love with Dorian, may it be for himself or for his art, I would have expected a bit more effort. It might have saved his life, but of course we'd also have a very different book and movie ...
Talking about being in love, Gladys didn't convince me at all, either. In what kind of dream world was she living?
Actually, in what kind of dream world were they all living regarding Dorian's everylasting youth? How did no one grab a pitchfork and torch and try to get him?

I loved Angela Lansbury's performance for which she got an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe.
In the book Sibyl is an actress, not a singer, but of course the change worked perfectly for Lansbury.



Often when a young man falls for an actress or singer from the half-world, they are described as women hardened from their experiences, calculating their chances with a rich man, gold-diggers, blood suckers.
Sibyl is nothing like this although she has such a woman for a mother. You can tell when she takes the money from her mother and gives it back to Dorian.
She's innocent, trusting, romantic, and sweet. She loves him so much that she gives in to his demand to stay overnight just so she won't lose him (still sounds all too familiar today).

All of that makes Dorian's behavior towards her even more cruel, it's his first step into the abyss. To top that, he regrets it the next day, but then rather quickly shows indifference when he hears of her suicide, a sure sign he has chosen his path now.

The film is beautifully shot in black and white which gained it an Academy Award for "Best Cinematography, Black-and-white" (Harry Stradling), only the portrait is shown in Technicolor four times, both in its beautiful and in its ugly state which emphasizes its importance.

Painting by
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright,
now at the Art Institute of Chicago

The sets are very Victorian and there's a good contrast between the two different worlds, but as pointed out rightfully in one blog, the men's costumes don't exactly scream Victorian.
Levin seems to have been so keen on capturing the mood right and even sticking to the novel's text closely in parts that I don't understand why he would be okay with that.

I enjoyed the movie a lot although the only persons I actually liked were poor Sibyl and her brother James (although he shouldn't have trusted their mother to take care of her, but I doubt he could have done much being off to Australia when he had just found out).
I even enjoyed it so much that I went straight onto YouTube to look for another version for comparing, and I did watch another one.

This one is a television play from 1976 (someone complained about a novel by a playwright being turned into a play on television) with Peter Firth as Dorian, Jeremy Brett as Basil, and John Gielgud as Lord Henry.
It's an episode of the BBC series "Play of the Month".

I have known Peter Firth for a while, but had never seen him that young before. Except for his blond locks being a tad too luscious for my taste, he definitely matched my image of Dorian better, but - intended or not - he overdid the camp a bit too much sometimes.
The scene in which he left Sibyl - a very young actress in this case - was really good. She was completely broken and he didn't give a fig and was so mean to her.
Oh, and the scene in which he asked his friend Campbell to get rid of Basil's body was a lot more emotional.
I really liked him, but much to my surprise I liked Hatfield even more. So much for looks, huh?
I definitely preferred George Sanders to John Gielgud which probably had to do more with age than his play. Somehow I didn't see Dorian and Henry that far apart in years.
Not to my surprise I liked Jeremy Brett although the death scene was over the top.

Obviously the sets were limited to a few interiors, a television play isn't a feature film, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, also that there was a narrator introducing some of the scenes.

I don't think I feel like watching another version anytime soon, I already couldn't finish another one that didn't work for me at all.
So next stop novel?


Sources:

1. Jay Jacobson: 151. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1945. An unforgettable and thought provoking supernatural thriller. On: Jay's Classic Movie Blog, April 30, 2024
2. Trystan L. Bass: TBT: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). On: Frock Flicks, October 5, 2017
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) - A Timeless Reflection of Vanity and Corruption. On: Surgeons of Horror,  March 2, 2025
4. "hurdhatfieldluv": Hurt Hatfield in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) ... Is he really a good actor?. On Tumblr