I am fond of George Sanders and the droll manner in which he always presented himself on-screen and in real life. This is an actor well-suited to deliver clever and incisive dialogue, and I didn’t think any movie could have enough of that. Then I saw 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and realized how wrong I was.
Perhaps it wasn’t the brilliance of the lines (and they are brilliant), as much as the sheer volume and the speed with which he spits them out. It is odd to have Oscar Wilde’s wit delivered like machine gun fire, and the effect of each bon mot is diminished by this approach. Sanders talks so much and so fast at times that I think he may have somehow stepped on his own lines on occasion.
Consider this small sampling of the wit deluge: “To regain one’s youth is to repeat one’s follies.” “I apologize for the intelligence of my remarks. I forgot you are in Parliament.” “Every impulse we suppress broods in the mind and poisons us. There’s only one way to get rid of a temptation and that is to yield to it. Resist it, and the soul grows sick with longing for things forbidden to itself.” “As we grow older, our memories are haunted by the exquisite temptations we hadn’t the courage to yield to.”
What I found especially odd is Sanders is top-billed, yet he he doesn’t have much screentime. Instead, that honor goes to Hurd Hatfield, and those examples of remarks I presented (sans the one about the Parliament) will inspire him to do some unfortunate things, all in his increasingly hedonistic pursuits.
I do not recall having seen Hatfield in anything before, and his performance here does not make me want to seek out more of his work. He is so stiff that he could easily be mistaken for a mannequin. This was a deliberate choice by director Albert Lewin, who forced the actor to re-do any takes where he moved any more muscles in his face than were absolutely necessary. This results in an extremely restrained performance that is unlike the brash, loud man in the original novel. Still, there is something unnerving about Hatfield’s performance even before he commits his first murder. Also, The Kinks’s song “Plastic Man” came to mind within seconds of my first time seeing him.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, Hatfield is perfectly captured in a portrait made by Lowell Gilmore. Inspired by Sanders’s comments about the fleeting nature of youth, our protagonist makes a wish to have the portrait age while he himself stays young. I don’t know what the hearing range of a statue is normally, but he speaks this desire too closely to an ancient Egyptian of a cat. According to Sanders, that statue represents “one of the 73 great gods of Egypt”. I wondered what would happen if you made a wish on the 74th greatest god of Egypt. I also found myself trying to imagine what a remake today of this film would be like, and whether they would somehow work in the character of Jambi from Pee Wee’s Playhouse instead (“Did somebody say wish?”).
The painting seems to be truer to life than the man it captures, though partly because some of the times we see it in this otherwise black-and-white film are in color inserts. I thought that was an interesting filmmaking decision, and a wise one. The abrupt change from monochrome to color in these brief moments is startling, especially the one last time we see it in that manner. You see, Hatfield in the artwork doesn’t age, so much as it visually represents the rot in his soul. In its most extreme form, he is an insane-looking old man who looks like something out of those horror comics published by E.C. in the 50’s which resulted in the censorship board that was the Comics Code and which influenced films like Creepshow.
We’re only shown a bit of Hatfield’s two-decade streak of debauchery, and it is left to the imagination what most of that entails. That he is said to the ruin of the lives of women and men slyly suggests a bisexuality like that of Wilde.
But we do know how he has caused the demise of young Angela Lansbury, playing a singer in a low-class establishment. When we first see her perform, she follows a puppet show where the jerky figures have live actors as their faces, and I am waiting for this imagery to infiltrate my nightmares. Lansbury has somehow remained an innocent despite the decadence she had to have witnessed every single night in that pub.
Hatfield woos her until, while she is at his place one night, he tries to coerce her into staying the night with him. Tearfully, she heads to the door. He then tells her it is over between them, which is the incentive for her to change her mind and surrender her virginity to him. Cut to the next morning, when he writes a long, hateful letter to her, telling her she has failed his test and that he will have no more to do with her. That is some nuclear-grade toxic masculinity, and the resulting despair causes her to take her own life.
The next potential victim of his capriciousness is Donna Reed, playing the grown-up version of a very young daughter of Gilmore’s we saw earlier in the portrait-painting scene. As soon as we saw the little girl, I felt some discomfort as to whether she would age to become an object of Hatfield’s affection, given he will stay the same age. In a way, this is telegraphed in a statement from Sanders at the time: “You prefer him today but, as a young woman and turning all the heads in London, you may prefer the portrait. For it will look just as it does today, but we shall all be changed.”
There are many unusual touches in this picture, some welcome and some not. In the scene where Hatfield makes his wish, Sanders makes a real-time demonstration of the fleeting nature of beauty by capturing a butterfly from a curtain and euthanizing it with his top hat and saucer of ether. The butterfly is preposterously artificial and yet I still did not appreciate this moment, even if it serves the narrative well.
I want to single out another highly artificial moment, which stands out in stark contrast from a film otherwise so well made. This is one of the very first shots, where Sanders is riding in a carriage to Gilmore’s house. We see the sidewalk alongside the carriage, but from a perspective that would require his transportation to be tilted almost 45 degrees. The visual is striking, but curiously unnecessary and illogical.
There are a couple of moments of interest in the eventual hiding place of the artwork, and that is the upstairs schoolroom from Hurd’s childhood. There are letter blocks on the floor, and only listening to the commentary track revealed to me there will be additional blocks in later shots, a pair with the initials for each of Hatfield’s victims. This had me wondering if additional viewings might reveal more nuances, though I don’t think I’ll be in any hurry to return to this film any time soon.
One motif I was aware of in The Picture of Dorian Gray was the use of mirrors. Regular moviegoers know to watch for these as they are always employed as deliberate symbolism, usually to suggest something is hidden or the opposite of what it appears. Instead, I believe the mirrors largely represent the importance of appearances in the world of this movie’s characters. Perhaps that is indicative of the larger issue I suspect I had with this film: it may be well-made and full of elements which dazzle the viewer (such as the glut of wit dumped by Sanders) but which might not much of significance happening beneath the surface.
Dir: Albert Lewin
Starring George Sanders, Hurd Hatfield, Angela Lansbury, Donna Reed
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray