An otherwise attractive film with an early award-winning performance by a young Angela Lansbury as Sybil Vane, the film has a number of translation problems before it, not the least of which is Hollywood censorship: the more grotesque of Dorian’s sinful acts could not be brought to screen in the 1940s and so occur off-screen, merely obliquely referred to. In this particular case, film reflects book, for Wilde’s own works—Dorian included—were/are censored; some of his themes are left to subtext. 

Jarring Juxtaposition

But larger and audibly jarring is the movement between Wilde’s dialogue and Lewin’s original writing (mostly in scenes created to expand the novel to film length). From Wilde:

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.”

And Lewin:

Sibyl Vane : [Listening to Dorian play the piano]  It’s wonderful. Did… did you write it?

Dorian Gray : Fredric Chopin wrote it… for a woman he loved. Her name was George Sand. Someday I’ll tell you about it.

Sibyl Vane : I should like that.

Dorian Gray : [Playing a couple of notes]  What does music mean to you?

Sibyl Vane : I don’t know. It’s full of emotion… but it’s not happy.

Dorian Gray : No, it’s not happy.

Now, besides its entirely unenlightening interpretations (somehow these words will lead to a spontaneous and passionate first kiss, though), Lewin’s script may be fine enough. But it is not in the same territory as Wilde’s. And yet both styles exist side by side in the film. It is almost as if every other scene were a different writer creating a different story.

The Hypocrisies in Conscience

If expansion of the work is necessary—compared to contraction (all versions of Hamlet) or both expansion and contraction (Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings)—Lewin must either match the style of Wilde (no small undertaking), change all of the dialogue (which skewers the lead characters but especially the glib Lord Henry Wotton), or perhaps dodge the novel altogether. 

What we’re left with is a film that points to its horror in multiple directions. Part of Wilde’s subtext is the sublimation of sin and the role of conscience, its source and value: Wotton claims that, “Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.” His acidic, garrulous, and witty diatribes serve both to provoke the young Dorian and also to comment ironically on all of us. He doesn’t mean us to take him seriously, though he is serious about (most) of his observations. We’re the hypocrites who cannot write a principle worth living by, and Wotton the accuser is himself evidence for it : Dorian is that flaw laid open. 

Wotton’s infamous “yellow book” is mentioned briefly in the film, but is significant in the novel: an uninhibited work of sexual deviance (like homosexuality), perhaps from Paris. Wotton’s amoral “scientifically objective” distance seeks to shed him of accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, but by the end he must face the consequences of libertine existence. In the film, Wotten does cry out that he is responsible for it all (good), but much of this layered social critique of Wilde is instead laid at the feet of a cat.

An Extra Character

Lewin’s film introduces an Egyptian cat statue which mysteriously foregrounds many of the scenes in Dorian’s home. Representing “the gods” of Egypt, it somehow hears Dorian’s desire to remain young and—like all Satanic symbols but here weirdly deferring the Christian precepts Wilde plays upon—grants him the curse, and so the painting ages and suffers as surrogate to his own fleshly costs. Perhaps Lewin wanted to give audiences a suitable explanation for the never-explained magic of the painting, a physical but supernatural account for the evil of the story.

And this, too, is a problem. Is the horror in the Cat? Or is the horror in us? Or is it just a bit of bad luck or bad choices that Dorian wished what he did? Lewin now has no idea, because all the Wilde dialogue that he used for Wotton, Basil, and occasionally Dorian has apparently little value but filling screen time and humorous asides. Wotton’s failure is in many ways the center of Wilde’s novel: Dorian is its consequence. And the film might have let us see this if the camera wasn’t spending so much time looking at a cat statue and playing ominous music around it. 

At work in the choice of dialogue here is one of the pillars of Wilde’s novel. By only partially claiming those words, Lewin’s film is aesthetically inconstant and loses its terrifying core, offering merely a spooky painting in replacement. 

Experiments in Translation