#86: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

5.5

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

I haven't seen any filmed versions of this story, but I was quite familiar with the plot.

BEST SEQUENCE

The climactic sequence during the last five minutes of the movie is quite memorable with some striking shots and visuals. Aside from that, anytime we see the painting it's pretty effective.

BEST LINE

"There's only one way to get rid of temptation, and that's to yield to it." - Lord Henry Wotton, the corrupting influence on Dorian Gray

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

93%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

None available, for some reason

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all."

THOUGHTS

• So, I feel like this is a pretty well known story, but just in case, spoilers ahead. As a wealthy young man of 22, Dorian Gray has his friend paint a portrait of him. While the painting is being finalized, Dorian makes a wish that he would never age physically, and instead the painting would age for him. Through some sort of ancient Egyptian mystical curse (or perhaps blessing), his wish is granted. Cut forward to 18 years later. Dorian still looks exactly the same, but he's been living a hedonistic, debaucherous lifestyle. So when we see the titular painting again, not only has the passage of time aged the person in the picture, but the lifestyle he's led has also turned it into a cruel, evil-looking old man. I haven't read the book by Oscar Wilde, so I don't know if the details are exactly the same, but that's how the movie plays out.
• And it really is a creepy painting, done in kind of a psychedelic way, which is interesting for a movie from 1945. If there's a chance you might watch this movie, try not to look it up beforehand. I had seen a picture of the painting already, but if I was completely surprised by it, I bet it would have been even more effective. If you don't plan on watching the movie, though, it's worth checking out a picture online. You can find one here, on Wikipedia.
• Adding to the impact, this is a black and white movie, but when we see the painting (both the original and the corrupted one), the shots are suddenly in colour. It's a pretty cool effect, although I wish we had gotten to see more of the painting as it was changing over the years. Then again, perhaps it was more effective to show the huge change which occurred over 18 years instead of a gradual progression.
• However, the movie isn't really very thrilling, and that might be partly due to the fact that they're quite coy about the evil deeds that Dorian has actually performed. This may be a result of the sudden jump to 18 years later, but we're never told what Dorian has been getting up to over those 18 years. Sex? Drugs? Violence? Overdue library fines? We can only assume. We do eventually see him kill a guy, but that happens after the painting has already reached its final form. And for the first act of depravity we see, before the 18 years pass, he kind of callously breaks off an engagement (with Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Like sure, that's not a nice thing to do, and she doesn't take it very well, but it's not necessarily evil.
• And interestingly, at least according to the IMDB trivia, Oscar Wilde's book was similarly written to obscure the bad things that Dorian has done to warp his painting so much. It was written in 1891, so perhaps Wilde was just showing restraint?
• Dorian was played by an actor named Hurd Hatfield, who I don't think I've seen in anything else. While he's supposed to be a man who maintains his youth and good looks while the painting changes, I thought he was pretty creepy looking from the get-go. He had dark, kind of soulless eyes, and his face was a bit cadaverous with high cheekbones. Plus, there are a lot of scenes which have an off-screen narrator describing Dorian's thoughts and feelings while Dorian himself just kind of wanders around or stares off at nothing, adding to the eeriness of his performance.
• Finally, as I mentioned, I never read the book, but we all know that Oscar Wilde was renowned for his wit. So while I don't know how much of it came from Wilde, or how much of it came from the screenwriter, I found this to be quite a witty movie. In particular, the character I quoted above, Lord Henry Wotton, played by George Sanders. He's always tossing out one-liners and cutting remarks, and he was a really fun character to watch

Up next: Another black and white horror classic which I've never seen, Bela Lugosi's Dracula from 1931.

#87-C: THE THING (2011) & THE X-FILES: "ICE" (1993) & WHO GOES THERE? (1938)

 

THE THING (2011)

First time seeing it and last time seeing it. First, the good: While the effects look extremely CGI, the visual appearances of some of the creatures are creative and effectively unnerving; there's some pretty great scenery; and it's vaguely interesting to see the leadup to the events of Carpenter's movie, but honestly, that aspect ended up being way less intriguing in execution than I had hoped. However, there's really no reason to watch this movie unless maybe you have a big crush on Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, and Tormund Giantsbane from Game of Thrones (and hey, I hit the trifecta). This is a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film (and not a spiritual prequel or anything; the last scene of this movie is the first scene of Carpenter's). However, Carpenter's movie was much more grounded and focused on the suspense and paranoia of the situation. Carpenter's Thing was scary because it was so adept at hiding, and it mostly only attacked when it was cornered or felt safe enough to do so. In the 2011 version, however, while there are some scenes of the Thing hiding in plain sight, it's much more prone to attacking. I didn't do the math, but I do believe the 2011 movie has way more action and attack scenes than Carpenter's. However, that doesn't necessarily make it better or more exciting. Carpenter doled out the attack scenes carefully, sparingly, and somewhat stingily - you never really knew when they would happen, so the surprise effect was very real. In the 2011 version, on the other hand, this Thing is attacking people left and right with very little provocation and we grow numb to it. In fact, the 2011 movie may be more influenced by Alien or Aliens than The Thing, and this may even have been on purpose; the filmmakers have said that they wanted Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character to be a Ripley (Sigourney Weaver's character) type. But just like this movie pales in comparison to Carpenter's The Thing, it also pales in comparison to the Alien films, if that's even what it was going for. It doesn't have the creeping dread of Alien and it doesn't have the action of Aliens. Plus, the whole climax of this movie even takes place on the Thing's spaceship, leaving the claustrophobic confines of the Antarctic outpost. Carpenter's Thing was patient, sly and cunning. This Thing is just a movie monster and there's very little suspense. This may only be of interest to fans of Carpenter's movie, to see the story done slightly differently, but anyone who hasn't seen Carpenter's should watch that instead of this one. And even fans of Carpenter's will probably just wish they were rewatching his instead. I sure did.

THE X-FILES: "ICE" (1993)

I have never seen anything X-Files related. No episodes, no movies. This is the first. And I dug it! It isn't the equal of Carpenter's movie, but it is a reverent homage, and it replicates the tension of the 1982 film better than the 2011 prequel did. With a TV budget the focus isn't on special effects. There's no body horror, no physical transformations, but we do get the paranoia and uncertainty of who's safe and who's infected. While I do love the special effects in Carpenter's film and the movie just wouldn't be the same without the gore and the transformation scenes, watching this X-Files episode right after watching the 2011 version of The Thing may serve as evidence that the 2011 filmmakers got the wrong impression about what made Carpenter's film such an effective movie.

WHO GOES THERE? (1938)

So this short story, by John W. Campbell Jr., inspired everything I've been watching and reviewing for the last few weeks, but mostly The Thing From Another World from 1951 and John Carpenter's The Thing from 1982. To start with, it barely resembles the 1951 movie outside of a cold setting (the North Pole in the movie, Antarctica in the story), an alien and a spaceship found in the ice, the alien getting thawed out, and the alien being not very nice. The only similarity the original movie has that Carpenter's doesn't is the way that the protagonists use a form of electrocution against The Thing. Carpenter's movie, then, is much more clearly inspired by the story. Many of the characters' names are the same, the shapeshifting aspect is preserved, the flamethrower originated in the short story as a blowtorch, and we have quite a few of the same plot points. While I enjoyed the story, though, Carpenter's film packs a visual punch that the story can't match, even with some creatively descriptive passages. Some of the men in the short story (and it's all men, no women, just like in Carpenter's movie) effectively go insane, which would probably have been a reasonable response, but didn't happen in either film. Also, numerous times in the story, the men refer to each other as "birds", which always caught me off guard as a bit of slang I've never heard before, at least not to refer to males. I enjoyed the short story, but Carpenter took the good parts of it and ran with it. As could have been predicted, after these few weeks, Carpenter's version reigns supreme as the ultimate iteration of this tale! But if you want to read it, here you go: Who Goes There?

And finally, one last note: this short story, told from the point of view of Carpenter's Thing, has been recommended by several readers and it is excellent.

Up next: OK! As much as I love The Thing, I've been watching and writing about it in some form or another for weeks! Time for something new. Back to the AFI list, with #86, The Picture of Dorian Gray from 1945.