I peccati di Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray (female) started to age just like the real Dorian Gray (male) in Oscar Wild's novel. Disappointingly boring. This flick deserves one out of ten.

As many students in my faculty I read THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY at least once because English literature is among the subjects in the course. As for the movie adaptations I saw only the 1945 one which is considered by many the most faithful adaptation with the movie in black and white but the painting scenes in colour. And when in January 2024 I finally started assaulting Michael Ironside's neverending filmography, I stumbled upon this different version. Is it good and faithful to the book or not? We'll find out.

The main difference with the novel and the previous movie versions is that this time Dorian Gray (Belinda Bauer) is a woman, and very beautiful and wealthy to boot but there is one problem; she repels and damages everybody around her tho she has been on the top of the world for at least 20 years. Well it's because she sold her soul with a screen test (unlike the original novel and other adaptations with a painting) for eternal youth and beauty while the screen test becomes older and depraved to the point that everyone seduced by it then has bad things happening. This goes on and on until one evening Dorian plays the screen test in her living room and she understands that she has to destroy the screen test for her safety and she does, accepting finally to become old.

Looking among the reviews I noticed only one that gives it a 10, only one that gives it a 1 and most of scores between 4 and 6 meaning that it might be a bad movie. Well, when I saw it I liked it more than the average people that reviewed it here probably because I saw it as just another version of the Dorian Gray story and it was just as good. So for this reason alone I'd recommend it.

Just as R.L. Stevenson's quintessential dual-personality tale was revamped by Hammer as DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE (1971), it was not inconceivable that Oscar Wilde's similar narrative would be rethought on distaff lines. The result is quite tolerable under the circumstances but, emanating from the Rankin/Bass stable (renowned for animated kiddie fare!), it was deemed to have merely scraped the surface of what was basically a critique of the moral decay overtaking Victorian society (epitomized by the notorious Jack The Ripper killings). Not unexpectedly, then, the theme of the novel was updated to contemporary times and transposed to the glitzy fashion world of L.A. (making the whole feel rather like a typical "Emmanuelle" entry but without the copious nudity!): here, the protagonist becomes a modeling celebrity but, unwisely, the all-important "picture" is made out to be screen-test footage, cue unconvincing make-up effects to illustrate its increasing degeneration and, played over and over during the course of the movie, it proves quite enervating! Therein, however, lays its major problem: since the plot is supposed to unfold in the space of 30 years, the look (sets, costumes, hairstyles) throughout never changes to reflect this passage of time, which history books attest to having been pretty considerable! Anyway, the film essentially rests on the shoulders of its variable cast – led by Anthony Perkins in the Lord Henry Wotton persona (creatively redubbed Henry Lord!) and Belinda Bauer (not too bad considering, but perhaps managing best the bitchy aspects of the title role, and which would subsequently typecast her!). Olga Karlatos appears as Perkins' wife and rival(!) for Dorian's services (and affections?), Joseph Bottoms the pseudo-singer/pianist who captures her heart if only for a little while (precipitating his suicide) and Michael Ironside is the photographer eventually reduced to 'cleaning up' after her. For what it is worth, we are even treated to a cheesy title song which, again, is picked up ad nauseam along the way!

I Know. Oscar Wilde did not deserve this but here are some clues that may help us in judging this film more nicely. First of all, I think it was a good idea to make Dorian Gray a woman in the eighties as an aspiring actress-turned-to-be top model. Did you know that for the 1945 Lewin's version, Greta Garbo wanted the leading role dearly? Secondly, it is not so ridiculous to use a "film" instead of a picture or a "portrait". We have to remember that here we are in Los Angeles at the moment when the VHS exploded. This adaptation only reflects the epoch in which it was made. Could you imagine a girl snubbing a movie role for a modeling career instead nowadays? Finally, I liked the song. It summarizes the real story, it is seductive and tries to tell us the causes and consequences of the sins Dorian supposedly committed (but which of course we don't see). Unhappily, these elements alone do not make a good adaptation. I would have started by a better written script and a better casting. Anthony Perkins as Henry Lord (instead of Lord Henry Wotton, not so clever after all) is really alone in this one.

I've been seeking adaptations of Oscar Wilde's novel since reading it, which is something I've also recently done with Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," but there aren't as many Dorian Gray movies available as there are for the other two, so I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel, and this awful 1980s TV movie is at the bottom. It does try to do two semi-novel things in reworking the book, which is welcome, but it entirely mucks them up and, consequently, has very little to do with what Wilde's story is actually about.

One of those semi-novel things is the gender reversal, that Dorian Gray is a woman here. (A now-lost 1915 film adaptation also starred a woman.) I saw a 2007 TV "Frankenstein" movie that did something interesting with a similar gender reversal of its eponymous character. Not so here. Rather, all of the gay subtext of Wilde's tale is gone, although I doubt there would be much left even if this TV movie cast a man as Dorian. This fem Dorian only flirts with the opposite sex, but we never see or are explicitly told that she ever has any liaisons. She begins the movie as a waitress and aspiring artist and becomes a successful model for beauty products. Absurdly, this lands her photograph on the covers of Life, Newsweek and Time magazines. Right, as if that ever happens for mere models. An elderly Henry picks up the Newsweek one, which is inscribed, "What ever happened to Dorian Gray?" It must've been a slow news week.

Like the 2007 "Frankenstein" TV movie, this one is also updated to the present, and it reverses the genders of a few other characters. Instead of Sibyl Vane, it's Stuart Vane, and rather than him being a Shakespearean actor as Sibyl was in the book, he's a singing piano player who prefers to perform at a bar where nobody listens to him because of his stage fright and, perhaps, he has some kind of drug problem. He's also married with a baby on the way and rides a motorcycle. Like the book, Dorian falls out of love with her/him because of their failure to perform, but in this case the lack of performance is unintentional, as it's due to Vane's anxiety. There's also no Basil, the painter of Dorian's portrait, here, but Henry's wife, renamed Angela, is a filmmaker who replaces him.

This is the other semi-novel concept of this one: instead of a painting, the picture of Dorian Gray is a motion picture, or rather a screen test for a role that Dorian ultimately doesn't accept. (This is similar to the use of video surveillance for the Dorian-esque character in "Phantom of the Paradise" (1974).) The scene is of Dorian's portrait being painted, like the scene of Basil and Dorian in the book. Since this Dorian is female and the "Basil" in the screen test is male, however, again, there's no homoeroticism. This alteration from the source is full of interesting self-reflexive possibilities, and this TV movie does next to nothing with it, except to cause the ending to make less sense. Removing Vane from being an actor also subtracts the self-reflexive potential of acting, of a play-within-a-play.

On top of these failures, there are two unnecessary flashforwards. Bernard Hoffer's song of the same name is loudly and annoyingly played a few times in lieu of anything happening in the way of plot. Henry is the narrator, Alan Campbell is a photographer now, and the book's ambiguously gay blackmail plot is reduced to collecting on an IOU. A Tracy character invented for this movie comes out of nowhere--well, actually she comes from just the scene prior--to accuse Dorian of murder, which begs the questions of how does Tracy know this, why does she care and why would we care about her opinion on the matter? The movie lacks all of the aestheticism and hedonism of the original. Although renamed "The Sins of," the only sins the movie shows are murder. No sex. No drugs. Dorian has a party at her relatively-small apartment, which includes drag queens--the closest, I guess, this adaptation comes to transgressiveness, but all they're doing is watching TV. Wilde wrote his novel in the Victorian age and yet his prose was far more daring than this regressive 1980s TV dreck. He had to allude to a lot, but even his Dorian explicitly went to an opium den, had affairs with various women and made a mockery of religion. This TV Dorian is told to pray by Henry, and she dutifully does just that!

The acting is wretched, too. Dorian goes from a grinning fool to a sobbing, wining and sniveling drama queen. And this is the worst Lord Henry I've ever seen. I love "Psycho" (1960), but I'm not sure Anthony Perkins can act hardly at all, especially if this movie is any indication. It's bad enough that the movie removes almost all of Wilde's epigrams given voice by Henry, and that they largely removed his immorality. Perkins is wooden in the part: he delivers his lines with odd pauses and speaks as though out of the side of his mouth, and his movements are stiff and sometimes artificially abrupt. Even the other bad Dorian Gray movies I've seen tend to have the saving grace of the wit of Wilde's original Lord Henry, but here, the saving grace for this Henry may be that it's so bad in every way that Perkins is somewhat disguised.