Basil Hallward, a celebrated artist, had completed a portrait which he privately declared was his masterpiece. It was a picture of Dorian Gray, a wealthy and handsome young man, who was a gr... Read allBasil Hallward, a celebrated artist, had completed a portrait which he privately declared was his masterpiece. It was a picture of Dorian Gray, a wealthy and handsome young man, who was a great favorite in London society. Basil and Dorian were looking at the painting in the artis... Read allBasil Hallward, a celebrated artist, had completed a portrait which he privately declared was his masterpiece. It was a picture of Dorian Gray, a wealthy and handsome young man, who was a great favorite in London society. Basil and Dorian were looking at the painting in the artist's studio when Lord Henry Wotton, a mutual friend, came in. He complimented Dorian upon t... Read all
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These scenes are well structured here, too, alternating between shots where Dorian is in the foreground and Sybil on stage in the background, closer views of Dorian as spectator, ones of Sybil on stage, and others of the rest of the theatre's audience. The film shows her performing in both "Romeo and Juliet" and "As You Like It," the latter of which features the actress playing Sybil performing Rosalind pretending to be Ganymede. Moreover, while in this male disguise, Sybil kisses Dorian, for the only time in the film, in her dressing room. This is surely the closest this 1915 production could get to alluding to the homosexual subtext of Wilde's story. This might be the most clever of a few visual cues in the silent abridgement--there's also a star of David on the dressing room door, which alludes to the manager's Judaism, and, naturally, the decorations of Dorian's home offer a hint of his aestheticism and decadence. The commentary provided by the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation on DVD and Vimeo for this film by Judith Buchanan also points out how the window drapes and Shakespeare bust in Dorian's home help to visually connect these scenes to the ones in the theatre. As well, there's some good use of mirrors, which complement, or reflect, the film's self-reflexivity and its doubles theme, of Dorian and his doppelgänger portrait, which displays his true age and sins while Gray remains eternally youthful.
There are a couple interesting alterations to the novel, too. Instead of a painting, the portrait is a photograph, which seems apt for an updated film adaptation. The picture's changes are accomplished via dissolves and stop-substitutions, a technique also employed in later films for the transformations of Jekyll/Hyde and werewolves. This Dorian also becomes a cocaine fiend, whereas he visited an opium den in the book; the commentary by James Williams points out that the change to cocaine had special resonance with the then-recent passage of the Harrison Act, an early gateway bill in America's War on Drugs, criminalizing the sort of drug addiction Dorian displays here. His addictive behavior also stems to his seemingly impulsive need to view his changing portrait. This emphasis on addiction is also a welcome substitute for the film's general lack of the sexual depravity alluded to by Wilde, although there's still a party scene here where Dorian kisses and places one of his female guests on his lap. Additionally, there's some nice crosscutting for a slightly different ending from that of the book, and Lord Henry, whose role is otherwise greatly reduced here, provides the catalyst for his friend's Faustian bargain with a toast, replacing the wish that Wilde's Dorian made.
The most obvious difference between this film and the novel, however, is the absence of Wilde's words, especially his famous epigrams. Seemingly, adapting any of Wilde's works into a silent film seems folly, given the importance of clever word play in them. Ernst Lubitsch faced this problem in a somewhat better-known instance with his 1925 adaptation of "Lady Windermere's Fan." Both Lubitsch and Thanhouser before him decided to excise Wilde's epigrams entirely. This film, instead, employs title cards only to describe the plot and quotes Wilde only once at the end. What it offers instead is what remains one of the better cinematic realizations of Wilde's novel. It's heavily abridged, but it retains the right stuff. Unfortunately, many filmmakers seem to have lost this focus on visual storytelling with the advent of sound synchronization. Sure, they give us Lord Henry's amusing witticisms, but many of them don't reflect the art of Wilde's tale visually.
This may explain why there were actually a few adaptations of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" in the early silent era--because filmmakers realized this visual potential. Unfortunately, this is the only one that seems to be available today. The others appear to be either lost or otherwise unavailable, which is too bad because they seemed potentially interesting. The earliest is a Danish film featuring one of cinema's first stars, Valdemar Psilander, and Danish cinema in the 1910s was in the forefront of mise-en-scene, including the use of mirrors. Supposedly, there's also a 1913 film made by Lois Weber, one of the most intelligent filmmakers of the era, and her husband and starring Wallace Reid. Another 1915 version was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, a well-regarded Russian theatre director, and featured a woman in the lead role (something repeated much later in the 1983 TV-movie "The Sins of Dorian Gray"). And a 1918 Hungarian adaptation is said to have starred Bela Lugosi as Lord Henry. At least, we have this Thanhouser edition, and it holds up well.
- Cineanalyst
- Sep 7, 2018
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- Слика Доријана Греја
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- Runtime22 minutes
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- 1.33 : 1
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