The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Location: Home (VHS)
Seen Before: No
Rating: 3.0

I hate to be one of the "book was better than the film" types, but what can you do when it's true?

The problem with this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel (which I finished the other week) is that it tries too hard to spell it all out for the audience--it doesn't trust us enough. Wilde's novel sees no reason for an explination of why Dorian Gray is able to remain youthful while his portrait grow grotesque, but the film feels it necessary (and it isn't!) to invent one. At the same time, the filmmakers show a true lack of creativity in their adaptation, opting to only add to the novel in an attempt to undercut our intelligence as viewers. The single time that I felt shocked and moved by the film--and there plenty of these moments in the text--came by way of the deformed Gray portrait. "Finally," I thought, "someone has decided to take a chance with this." In the hands of a young Kubrick, for which this material seems almost tailor-made, we would be left with a film as classic as its source material.