January 26, 2010: XX:3 ALBERT LEWIN: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 1945

(110 minutes)

Directed and written by Albert Lewin Based on the novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Produced by Pandro S. Berman Original Music by Herbert Stothart Cinematography by Harry Stradling Sr. Film Editing by Ferris Webster Art Direction by Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters Set Decoration by Edwin B. Willis George Sanders...Lord Henry Wotton Hurd Hatfield...Dorian Gray Donna Reed...Gladys Hallward Angela Lansbury...Sibyl Vane Peter Lawford...David Stone Lowell Gilmore...Basil Hallward Richard Fraser...James Vane

Cedric Hardwicke...Narrator Oscar for best cinematography, B&W, Harry Stradling Sr. Nominated: Best actress in supporting role (Angela Lansbury), best art direction/interior/b&w (Cendric Gibbons et al) ALBERT LEWIN (September 23, 1894, Brooklyn, New York — May 9, 1968, New York City, New York, pneumonia) directed and produced 23 films, some of which were The Living Idol (1957), Saadia (1953), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Moon and Sixpence (1942). OSCAR FINGAL O'FLAHERTIE WILLS WILDE (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) (from Wikipedia): an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest "celebrities" of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. As the result of a widely covered series of trials, Wilde suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years' hard labour after being convicted of homosexual relationships, described as "gross indecency" with other men. After Wilde was released from prison he set sail for Dieppe by the night ferry, never to return to Ireland or Britain.

GEORGE SANDERS (July 3, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia—April 25, 1972, Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain, suicide) appeared in

134 films and tv series, some of which were Psychomania (1973), Endless Night (1972), The Kremlin Letter (1970), The Body Stealers (1969), The Candy Man (1969), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), "Batman" (2 episodes, 1966), "Daniel Boone" (1 episode, 1966), "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (2 episodes, 1965), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), Village of the Damned (1960, Solomon and Sheba (1959), "The George Sanders Mystery Theater" (1 episode), Viaggio in Italia (1954), Call Me Madam (1953), I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951), All About Eve (1950), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Fan (1949), Forever Amber (1947), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), The Lodger (1944), The Moon and Sixpence (1942), A Date with the Falcon (1942), The Gay Falcon (1941), The Saint in Palm Springs (1941), The Saint Takes Over (1940), Rebecca (1940), The House of the Seven Gables (1940), The Saint in London (1939), The Saint Strikes Back (1939), Lloyd's of London (1936), Things to Come (1936) and Love, Life and Laughter (1934). Won Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar for All About Eve (1950).

HURD HATFIELD (December 7, 1917, New York City, New York —December 26, 1998, Monkstown, County Cork, Ireland, heart attack) appeared in 70 films and tv series, some of which

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were Lies of the Twins (1991) (TV), "Murder, She Wrote" (3 episodes, 1984-1989), Her Alibi (1989), "Amazing Stories" (1 episode, 1987), "General Hospital" (1963) (unknown episodes, 1986), Crimes of the Heart (1986), "The Fall Guy" (1 episode, 1986), "Knight Rider" (1 episode, 1986), King David (1985), Waiting to Act (1985), "Kojak" (1 episode, 1976), The Norliss Tapes (1973) (TV), "Bonanza" (1 episode, 1972), "The F.B.I." (1 episode, 1972), The Boston Strangler (1968), Mickey One (1965), Harlow (1965/II), El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), "Lux Playhouse" (1 episode, 1959), The Left Handed Gun (1958), "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (2 episodes, 1956), "Kraft Television Theatre" (1 episode, 1955), "Studio One" (3 episodes, 1952-1954), "Lights Out" (1 episode, 1951), Chinatown at Midnight (1949), Joan of Arc (1948), The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and Dragon Seed (1944). DONNA REED (January 27, 1921, Denison, Iowa—January 14, 1986, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, pancreatic cancer) appeared in 50 films and tv series, some of which were "Dallas" (24 episodes, 1984-1985), "The Love Boat" (2 episodes, 1984), "The Donna Reed Show" (275 episodes, 1958-1966), The Whole Truth (1958), Beyond Mombasa (1956), "Tales of Hans Anderson" (1 episode, 1955), The Far Horizons (1955), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), From Here to Eternity (1953), Saturday's Hero (1951), Chicago Deadline (1949), Green Dolphin Street (1947), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Faithful in My Fashion (1946), They Were Expendable (1945), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Gentle Annie (1944), See Here, Private Hargrove (1944), The Man from Down Under (1943), The Human Comedy (1943), Eyes in the Night (1942), Apache Trail (1942), Calling Dr. Gillespie (1942), The Courtship of Andy Hardy (1942), and The Get-Away (1941). ANGELA LANSBURY (October 16, 1925, Poplar, London, England) appeared in 101 films and tv series, some of which were Nanny McPhee (2005), "Law & Order: Trial by Jury" (1 episode, 2005), "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" (1 episode, 2005), Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle (2003) (TV), Murder, She Wrote: The Last Free Man (2001) (TV), "Murder, She Wrote" (264 episodes, 1984-1996), "Magnum, P.I." (1 episode, 1986), Death on the Nile (1978), Mister Buddwing (1966), Harlow (1965), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The World of Henry Orient (1964), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), All Fall Down (1962), The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), "Studio 57" (2 episodes, 1956), "Four Star Playhouse" (2 episodes, 1954-1955), "Fireside Theatre" (1 episode, 1955), "General Electric Theater" (1 episode, 1954), "Lux Video Theatre" (4 episodes, 1950-1954), Samson and

Delilah (1949), The Three Musketeers (1948), The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), The Harvey Girls (1946), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), National Velvet (1944), and Gaslight (1944). PETER LAWFORD (September 7, 1923, London, England — December 24, 1984, Los Angeles, California, liver and kidney disease) appeared in 116 films and tv series, some of which were Where Is Parsifal? (1983), "Fantasy Island" (3 episodes, 1979-1982), "The Jeffersons" (1 episode, 1981), Body and Soul (1981), "The Love Boat" (1 episode, 1979), "Hawaii Five-O" (1 episode, 1978), Fantasy Island (1977) (TV), Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976), Rosebud (1975), They Only Kill Their Masters (1972), Ellery Queen: Don't Look Behind You (1971) (TV), The Deadly Hunt (1971) (TV), "The Virginian" (1 episode, 1971), Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968), Harlow (1965), "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" (1 episode, 1965), The Longest Day (1962), Advise & Consent (1962), Exodus (1960), Ocean's Eleven (1960), Never So Few (1959), "Playhouse 90" (1 episode, 1956), "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars" (3 episodes, 1954-1956), "General Electric Theater" (1 episode, 1953), Easter Parade (1948), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), Cluny Brown (1946), Son of Lassie (1945), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Mrs. Parkington (1944), The Canterville Ghost (1944), The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Lord Jeff (1938), and Poor Old Bill (1931).

LOWELL GILMORE (December 20, 1906, Minnesota — January 31, 1960, Hollywood, California) appeared in 57 films and tv series, some of which were "The Adventures of Jim Bowie" (1 episode, 1958), Jeanne Eagels (1957), Comanche (1956), "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars" (1 episode, 1954), Lone Star (1952), Hong Kong/Bombs over China (1952), King Solomon's Mines

(1950) , Tripoli (1950), Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), Fortunes of Captain Blood (1950), Sword in the Desert (1949), The Secret Garden (1949), Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Dream Girl (1948), The Black Arrow (1948), The Prince of Thieves (1948), Calcutta (1947), Johnny Angel (1945), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and Days of Glory (1944).

RICHARD FRASER (March 15, 1913, Edinburgh, Scotland —1972, cancer) appeared in 37

films and tv series, some of which were "Hallmark Hall of Fame" (1 episode, 1952), "The Philco Television Playhouse" (1 episode, 1950), "Lights Out" (1 episode, 1950), "Suspense" (1 episode, 1950), Rogues' Regiment (1948), The Cobra Strikes /Crime Without Clues (1948), The Lone Wolf in London (1947), The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), Bedlam (1946), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Ladies Courageous (1944), Edge of Darkness (1943), Desperate Journey (1942), Busses Roar (1942), Eagle Squadron (1942), Joan of Paris (1942), How

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Green Was My Valley (1941), A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), and The Ghost Goes West (1935) CEDRIC HARDWICKE (February 19, 1893, Lye, Worcestershire, England —August 6, 1964, New York City, New York, lung ailment) appeared in 108 films and tv series, some of which are The Pumpkin Eater (1964), "The Outer Limits" (1 episode, 1964), "The Twilight Zone" (1 episode, 1963), "Burke's Law" (1 episode, 1963), "Studio One" (1 episode, 1958), Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Power and the Prize (1956), The Vagabond King (1956), "Four Star Playhouse" (1 episode, 1956), Richard III (1955), "Armstrong Circle Theatre" (1 episode, 1953), "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars" (2 episodes, 1952-1953), "Robert Montgomery Presents" (1 episode, 1953), "General Electric Theater" (1 episode, 1953), Salome (1953), The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), The White Tower (1950), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), Rope (1948), I Remember Mama (1948), Song of My Heart (1948), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), Wing and a Prayer (1944), The Lodger (1944), The Moon Is Down (1943), Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Suspicion (1941), Victory (1940), Tom Brown's School Days (1940), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Stanley and Livingstone (1939), King Solomon's Mines (1937), Green Light (1937), Things to Come (1936), Becky Sharp (1935), Les misérables (1935), Jew Süss (1934), Nell Gwyn (1934), The Lady Is Willing (1934), The King of Paris (1934), Bella Donna (1934), The Ghoul (1933), Orders Is Orders (1933), Rome Express (1932) Dreyfus (1931), Nelson (1926), and Riches and Rogues (1913).

HARRY STRADLING SR. (September 1, 1901, Newark, New Jersey —February 14, 1970, Hollywood, California) photographer 134 films and tv series, some of which were The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), Hello, Dolly! (1969), Funny Girl (1968), Walk Don't Run (1966), How to Murder Your Wife (1965), My Fair Lady (1964), Mary, Mary (1963), Gypsy (1962), Five Finger Exercise (1962), A Majority of One (1961), Parrish (1961), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), Who Was That Lady? (1960), A Summer Place (1959), The Young Philadelphians (1959), Auntie Mame (1958), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), The Pajama Game (1957), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Helen of Troy (1956), Guys and Dolls (1955), Johnny Guitar (1954), Forever Female (1954), A Lion Is in the Streets (1953), Androcles and the Lion (1952), Angel Face (1952), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), My Son John (1952), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Valentino (1951), In the Good Old Summertime (1949), The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), Words and Music (1948), Easter Parade (1948), The Pirate (1948), Song of Love (1947), The Sea of Grass (1947), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Bathing Beauty (1944), Song of Russia (1944), Swing Shift Maisie (1943), The Human Comedy (1943), White Cargo (1942), Her Cardboard Lover (1942), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942), Mr. and Mrs. North (1942), Nazi Agent (1942), The Corsican Brothers (1941), Suspicion (1941), The Men in Her Life (1941), The Devil

and Miss Jones (1941), They Knew What They Wanted (1940), My Son, My Son! (1940), Jamaica Inn (1939), The Citadel (1938), Pygmalion (1938), Dark Journey (1937), La dame aux camélias (1934), Hey, Nanny Nanny (1933), Passionnément (1932), Un hombre de suerte (1930), Hearts and Hoofs (1930), America or Bust (1930), Ride 'em Cowboy (1930), So This Is Marriage (1929), The Nest (1927), How Women Love (1922), and The Devil's Garden (1920). He was nominated for 14 best cinematographer Oscars and won two, The Picture of Dorian Gray and My Fair Lady. Albert Lewin from World Film Directors, Vol. I. Ed. John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, NY, 1987. Entry by Philip Kemp. Albert Lewin (September 23, 1894 - May 9, 1968). American director, scenarist, and producer, was born into an immigrant family in Brooklyn, the youngest of the three children of Marcus and Yetta Lewin, and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. According to Lewin’s autobiographical note in The Real Tinsel, his father had held a variety of jobs: waterboy on a railroad construction gang, machine-operator in a shirt factory, and at one time “the only newsdealer in Flatbush.” He was a bookish man who read Shakespeare (in German) as well as Lessing and Schiller. But the dominant figure in Lewin’s childhood was his mother. “She was illiterate, but an extraordinary, intelligent and quite marvelous person; very, very capable. The Jews didn’t educate their daughters. Her brothers were schooled but she wasn’t. My mother was passionately determined that her children would have the education that she didn’t have. Out of a little neighborhood ice-cream store in Newark, she sent three children through college.” Despite his family’s relative poverty, therefore, Lewin had a highly cultured upbringing, “uncorrupted by any religious training whatsoever.” Both his parents loved music, and took him regularly to opera at the Met. Lewin took to all this with enthusiasm, studied assiduously, and won several scholarships to help himself through school. At New York University he majored in literature, played mandolin in the Glee Club, and “thought I was Keats and Shelley and Coleridge all wrapped up into one.” After graduating from NYU in 1915—head of his class and Phi Beta Kappa—he spent a year reading for his English MA at Harvard, where he was a charter member of the Poetry Society. (“We wrote bad verses and read them at each other.”) He then taught briefly at the University of Missouri, before joining the Jewish Relief Committee, of which he became Assistant National Director. In 1918 he was married to Mildred Mindlin. At NYU, Lewin had helped pay his way through college by writing occasional pieces for the Newark Evening News. Now his friend Bernard Bergman, who was editing the Jewish Tribune, offered him the post of drama critic—unpaid, apart from the free theatre tickets. Since both Lewin and his wife loved the theatre, he readily accepted, the more so since Bergman gave him a free hand to review whatever he liked. This soon came to include cinema. Lewin was particularly impressed by the films coming our of Italy and Germany: “What really got me going was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which I still think the finest

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film ever made. I decided I didn’t want to be a mediocre poet….I wanted to do something in films.” Through a friend of Bergman’s, a major exhibitor in Philadelphia, Lewin contacted Sam Goldwyn, who gave him a $50-a-week job as a reader—reading novels with an eye to their screen potential and writing synopses of them. Lewin found the work like being “a squirrel in a cage,” but stuck it out for nearly a year, before heading in 1923 for Goldwyn’s Culver City studios and demanding something nearer the action. After some persistence, since he was reckoned to be “overeducated,” he landed a job as a script clerk (responsible for continuity), in which capacity he worked with King Vidor and Victor Sjöström . “It was a tremendous education—how they directed and how they worked, how they handled the actors, how they staged the scenes.” He also worked unofficially, in the cutting room, picking up further useful skills. In 1924 Lewin moved to Metro as a screenwriter. His first assignment was to produce a script from a novel by Charles Norris, unpromisingly entitles Bread. Several other writers, he later discovered, had failed to make anything out of this stodgy material, but Lewin succeeded in turning out a usable script, which was filmed (1924) with Victor Schertzinger directing. While the film was in production, Metro was merged into the new MGM, with Louis B. Mayer as head of studio. In charge of production was the twenty-five-year-old prodigy, Irving Thalberg. Thalberg was impressed with Lewin’s work on Bread and steadily promoted him. Initially, though, Lewin had to serve his time scripting “quickies which I agreed to write on one condition—that I got no screen credit. They put my name on one of those stinkers, and I made them remake the main title.” But gradually the quality of his assignments improved, together with his status at the studio. Two of his most successful scripts at this period were adaptations of English stage hits, both directed on screen by Sidney Franklin: Quality Street (1926), from J.M. Barrie’s play, starring Hearst protegée Marion Davies; and The Actress (1928),based on Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells, with Norma Shearer as Rose Trelawney. By now, Lewin had been made head of the studio’s script department, and in 1928 he also became Thalberg’s personal assistant, working closely with him twenty-eight hours of the day. It was terrible. I never had time for myself.” In 1929 Lewin became a producer, entrusted with those projects in which Thalberg took the closest interest.His first production was Garbo’s last silent movie, The Kiss (1929), directed by Jacques Feyder; he also assisted Thalberg in making MGM’s belated but triumphant entry into sound, Broadway Melody (1929). Over the next few years, Lewin produced some of the studio’s glossiest and most prestigious pictures: The Guardsman (1931), with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne; Red-Headed Woman (1934), with Jean Harlow; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), with Gable and Laughton; The Good Earth (1937), with

Muni and Luise Rainer. Occasionally he suggested that he might try directing, but always allowed Thalberg to dissuade him. When Thalberg died in 1936, Lewin promptly quit MGM, thus greatly offending Louis B. Mayer, and joined Paramount, where he produced three films. Two of them did well: a screwball comedy with Carole Lombard called True Confessions (1937), and Spawn of the North (1938), an Alaskan melodrama. The third, Zaza (1939), a comedy with Cukor directing, flopped disastrously. Lewin, finding that his ideas were now being blocked, left Paramount and formed an independent company in partnership with David L. Loew to produce films for release through United Artists. Their first film was So Ends Our Night (1941), an anti-Nazi drama based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, directed by John Cromwell. Despite a strong cast, the film had little success in the United States (thanks possibly to isolationist sentiment), though it was well received in Britain. The company’s next production, it was evident, had to be made cheaply. Loew was keen to make a film of Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Moon and Sixpence and had bought the rights from MGM. “I hadn’t written a script in fifteen years,” Lewin said. “David wanted me to save the price of a writer, so he turned to me, “You’re a writer. For God’s sake, write.”

Lewin’s screenplay earned Maugham’s enthusiastic praise, and Lowe, still looking to cut costs, now suggested Lewin should direct the film as well. After some token resistance he agreed, bringing the picture well within schedule and budget. “I found directing a big challenge,” Lewin wrote in The Real Tinsel, “I didn’t have a great deal of facility, but I loved doing it. Everybody felt we’d make, at most, an artistic flop. They said, the story of a disagreeable character, a painter whose paintings are burned and who died of leprosy—this is

entertainment?” Apparently, it was. The Moon and Sixpence (1942) was a commercial and critical success, and gave George Sanders the first worthwhile part of his career as Charles Strickland, a dull stockbroker who deserts his family to become a Gauguinesque painter, finding his soul as he dies of leprosy in Tahiti. The film introduced a new technique to American cinema. The main obstacle that had prevented Maugham’s novel being filmed by MGM—or by Warners, who had previously owned the rights—was its narrative structure: the story is recounted by an author-figure who also, from time to time, participates in the action. No scriptwriter had been able to translate this into cinematic form. Lewin, however, had seen a film by Sacha Guitry, The Story of a Cheat (1936), that featured voice-over narration by a character who also appeared on screen, and realized that the device was ideal for The Moon and Sixpence After that, everybody used narrative technique like mad, even when it wasn’t necessary.” In Charles Strickland, Lewin presented the first of his gallery of obsessive and generally self-destructive protagonists. As always with Lewin, the script was literate to a fault, retaining

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much of Maugham’s original dialogue as well as the novel’s assured narrative pacing. The film was in black and white, apart from a final color sequence to show Strickland’s paintings—a combination Lewin used again, to even better effect in his next movie. “An admirable film until the end,” James Agate commented, “when it lapses into Technicolor and techno-pathos.” This was a minority view, however, and most reviewers agreed with C.A. Lejeune, who was moved by “that sudden flowering into Technicolour in the painter’s hut in Tahiti,” and called this “a real translation” from literature to cinema. Higham and Greenberg, in their survey of ’40s Hollywood, found it “an unorthodox and often beautiful film, finely acted.” At this point Loew, in spite of the partnership’s sudden success, decided to do war work, and Lewin was out of a job. Somewhat unexpectedly, he found himself back at MGM, after his old friend Sidney Franklin had arranged for Louis B. Mayer to see The Moon and Sixpence.” “A fine movie,” Mayer conceded. “A pity it wasn’t made by a nice guy instead of that son-of-a-bitch.” Nonetheless, he re-employed Lewin, and assigned him to direct Madame Curie (1943), a prestige production with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. After ten days, Lewin was taken off the picture. “I thought I was going mad. I just couldn’t make those people come to life. Perhaps I couldn’t direct at all. Mervyn LeRoy took over, and I used to sneak on to the set, to see if I could divine the great mystery to which he must have the key. I never managed to find out!” Fortunately, the studio retained enough faith in Lewin’s abilities to invite him to choose a project of his own. Lewin settled on Oscar Wilde’s Faustian fable, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the story of a rich young man about town in fin-de-siècle London whose ever-deepening moral corruption is reflected not in his own beautiful face but in the portrait he hides in his attic. One intriguing casting possibility came to nothing. Greta Garbo, it seemed, wanted to play Dorian Gray. Lewin “moved heaven and earth to set it up. But everyone had a fit: the censorship problem, formidable anyway, would become insurmountable with a woman en travesti playing the role. “I had to give up, but I’ve always regarded that as one of the screens great lost opportunities,” Instead, the title role went to Hurd Hatfield, with George Sanders stealing the film as his bad angel, Lord Henry Wotton, and Angela Lansbury as the ill-fated Sybil Vane, who kills herself when Dorian rejects her. Visually, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) is consistently superb. Lewin’s complex, slightly mannered style provided an excellent cinematic equivalent for Wilde’s studied prose; and his intention of making each scene exquisite down to the last detail was well served by Hans Peter’s baroque sets and Harry Stradling’s elegant cinematography. As before, Lewin mixed monochrome and color, reserving the latter for periodic glimpses of the eponymous portrait (painted for the film by Ivan Albright) deliquescing into vividly lush decay. As always, Lewin wrote his own script (working in frequent references to his favorite poem The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám). Opinions varied

as to its quality, but the general feeling was that Lewin had improved on the original by “rooting out all the preciousness which gets in the way of the melodrama” James Agee dismissed the whole affair as “respectful, earnest and, I’m afraid, dead,” but another critic, objecting to the spoken narrative which interrupts the visual flow of the story,” went on: “But then Mr. Lewin is a

literary director...and it is, probably, his literary sensibility which has enabled him to translate into such elaborate and pictorial terms the elaborate artificialities of Wilde’s writing.” Dorian Gray earned Harry Stradling an Oscar, plus a nomination for Angela Lansbury, and more than recouped its costs; but Lewin had run over schedule and budget, and it was felt at MGM that he had been unnecessarily extravagant. He therefore quit the studio once again

and reformed his partnership with David Loew, for whom he directed his third film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). Based on Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami, it starred Lewin’s perennial favorite George Sanders as the charming, unscrupulous journalist who achieves success at the expense of the women who love him. Once again the film was a constant pleasure to the eye, with lavish sets recreating the opulent, artificial world of Paris in the Belle Époque. It features a commissioned painting by Max Ernst (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”), and Darius Milhaud contributed a fine score. But Lewin’s script, witty and literate as ever, tended at times to slow down the action, and the film was marred by a moralistic ending, imposed by the censors in which Bel Ami meets his deserts in a fatal duel. (Lewin did, however, take the opportunity to stage this scene superbly, in a torrential downpour with lights gleaming off dark wet umbrellas.) Bel Ami failed at the box office, and Lewin—now on excellent terms with Louis B. Mayer—returned to MGM as an executive. After doing “a hell of a lot of anonymous doctoring” on other people’s films, Lewin took a year’s leave of absence to make Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) as an independent production. This was the first film in which Lewin set out from an original idea of his own rather than adapting someone else’s novel. The story transposed the legend of the Flying Dutchman to modern Spain, where the hero, condemned to sail the Seven Seas forever, meets the reincarnation of his dead love in a small Costa Brava fishing port. Ava Gardner and James Mason took the title roles, and Lewin shared production costs with a British company, Romulus Films. Once again, there are references to The Rubáiyát and a significant painting but, unusually for Lewin, most of the movie was shot (by Jack Cardiff) on location and for the first time he filmed entirely in color. In Pandora, Lewin’s taste for the bizarre, the operatic, and the romantic reaches its apotheosis. Reflecting the influence of such surrealists as Delvaux and de Chirico, the film unrolls in a dream-like, unreal atmosphere where past and present exist in startling juxtaposition. On any literal level, the plot is clearly ludicrous, and at the time most critics reacted in contemptuously

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literal terms. Dilys Powell found in it “film compositions of a romantic delicacy which you do not easily forget,” but C.A. Lejeune called it “conspicuous in its confident assumption of scholarship and its utter poverty of imagination and taste,” and Richard Winnington was only marginally more indulgent: “It might have been enjoyably silly but for Lewin’s striving to be classy and an air of third-rate decadence that hangs about it.” More recently, though, there have been signs that the film is being revalued, and may even be acquiring cult status. Georges Sadoul saw it as a “symbolic paean to feminine beauty,” and David Thomson found it “impressive in a romantic, thundery way.” In an article in Cinématographe (January 1982), Claude Arnaud commended Lewin’s attempt to “create cinema which, for all its weaknesses, gathers together the fragments of the great legends, from Faust to Eve, from Tristan to the Ghost Ship, and tries to express the unutterable.” After Pandora, Lewin returned to MGM, for whom he made his two last films: Saadia (1954), based on a novel by Francis d’Autheville, in which a young French doctor (Mel Ferrer) rescues a Berber girl (Rita Gam) from local superstition; and The Living Idol (1957), a drama of reincarnation set in Mexico. Both films were disappointing, marred by weak casting, and overwhelmed by the preciousness which had always threatened Lewin’s work. Claude Arnaud has suggested that Albert Lewin was always likely to fall between two stools: “Europeans sneered at the ‘Yankee’s intellectual pretensions; his designs mixed spots with stripes, like ties worn by a nouveau riche. And Americans had little relish for the acid which he splashed on their healthy morality.” Artiness, pretension and vulgarity have been the criticisms most frequently levelled at Lewin’s films, as in David Thomson’s verdict that his “arty aspirations showed like a teenage slip. He cultivated a garnish sophistication—in subject, setting, style and actors—and sometimes achieved real vulgarity.” Ephraim Katz, more sympathetically, summed up Lewin’s output as “a curious but interesting mixture of the naive and the sophisticated, the dilettantish and the fascinating, the vulgar and the refined.” As yet, his films have attracted little serious critical attention, even though so eminent a figure a Jean Renoir rated him as a conscious artist, “indispensable to the health of our times.” It may be, as Claude Arnaud suggests, that Lewin’s highly individual romanticism, with its protagonists “tormented by a need for excess, by a blind longing for which they can find no satisfaction,” is due for a return to fashion.” After completing The Living Idol, Lewin suffered a heart attack, and retired from filmmaking. Soon afterwards, he and his wife Mildred left California and moved to New York, where they lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park, the rooms crowded with books, musical scores, ancient Minoan fragments, modern paintings, and numerous other objets d’art. In 1966 Lewin published a novel of the supernatural, The Unaltered Cat. He died of heart failure at the age of seventy-three.

from Magill’s American Film Guide, Volume 4. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983 “The Picture of Dorian Gray” entry by Alain Silver Even before his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, screenwriter and director Albert Lewin was known for his interest in literature. His only previous film was taken from Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence, a fictionalized biography of painter Paul Gauguin that had attempted to analyze the nature of the artistic temperament in a straightforward and detailed manner. Obviously, Wilde’s novella was a radically different kind of subject; its central premise was clearly supernatural, and its title character was not a historical figure. Yet, Wilde and Gauguin were products of the same late-nineteenth century aesthetic temperament, and as such shared a specific conception of European civilization. Ironically, while Gauguin’s monomania finally drove him to physical flight from civilization, Wilde’s egocentricity led to another type of flight—one inward into unassailable cynicism. Lewin derives much the same irony from the predicament of both men, for both

were fallen idealists unable to reconcile their innate Romanticism with the repressive realities of Victorian society. The Picture of Dorian Gray is much closer to its source material in narrative structure than most films. This may be partly due to the fact that Wilde’s work, being only of novella length, required less condensing than typical adaptations of longer fiction. It is also due to the fact that Wilde developed the plot of his book with an episodic structure which

more closely resembled his own poems and plays than the prose of his contemporaries. In the film, the exposition of the main premise is not complicated. While posing for a painting by his friend Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore), Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) is introduced to the dissolute Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders). Dorian has fallen into a depression because the painting is almost finished, and now he must face the fact that while his visage on the canvas will remain perpetually youthful, he, the subject, will grow old. Wotton, in a display of his arcane knowledge, notes that Dorian is posing with an Egyptian artifact of considerable antiquity, the golden statue of a cat which has the legendary power to grant wishes. Half seriously, Dorian wishes that he will remain young while the figure in the painting takes on all the decay and corruption of advancing age. Even for the viewer not familiar with Wilde’s novella, the construction and genre indicators or the opening scene are relatively explicit. As easily as Mephistopheles before Faust, the cat of the seventy-three dynasties grants Dorian’s wish. Unlike Faust or any other of the classic figures who sell their souls, however, Dorian Gray is not immediately aware that a preternatural transaction has taken place. In fact, director Lewin’s approach is to prolong the audience’s uncertainty well

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beyond the point at which Wilde revealed Dorian’s condition to his readers. In doing so he creates an unusual tension in the first portion of the film, for the expectations of the viewers tell them that the information about the cat’s power and Dorian’s spoken wish cannot have been meaningless bits of dialogue. At the same time, Lewin gives the viewer no confirmation that something unnatural has occurred, but rather proceeds with a realistic development of the narrative. Dorian does fall under the influence of Lord Wotton, but Lewin masks the extent of Dorian’s inclination to adopt Wotton’s decadent life style. Instead, Lewin’s decidedly literary script caps this turn in the film’s plot with a series of complex conceits. Dorian accompanies Wotton to a music hall where he makes the acquaintance of a young singer, Sybil Vane (Angela Lansbury). Sybil, struck by Dorian’s handsomeness and kindly manner, distorts a music hall stereotype and dubs him her Sir Tristan; in return, Dorian tries to heighten Sybil’s cultural awareness. He plays a Chopin prelude for her, and when Sybil comments on how unhappy the music sounds, Dorian tells her of the composer’s forlorn love for George Sand. Perhaps the wryest moment in Lewin’s script comes when he has Dorian read Sybil a passage from a book by a rising young author named Oscar Wilde. Wotton disparages Dorian’s infatuation with Sybil; but when the youth rejects his callous urging that he seduce her and have done with it, Wotton offers the alternate proposal that Dorian put her chastity to the test. Dorian succumbs to Wotton’s suggestion, and Sybil fails the test when she succumbs to Dorian’s sexual extortion. The disillusioned Dorian brashly writes a demeaning letter to Sybil which causes her to commit suicide. In narrative terms, the ultimate effect of this tragic relationship with Sybil is to convince Dorian that, having made the wish, he is fated to carry out its consequences, to live corruptly and watch the evidence of that corruption slowly appear on the face of the portrait. When Dorian first notices a slight change in the expression of his painted likeness, he is still not certain whether the change is real or a product of his inflamed imagination. After Sybil’s death, the changes are still superficial but there is no longer any doubt that they are there; and Dorian removes the painting from public view. In the novella, Dorian takes this development as a clear condemnation of his behavior, etched by the same unseen hand which predestined his fall from grace. Lewin translates Wilde’s literary determinism into visual terms. When Dorian is alone in his drawing room, the camera repeatedly moves and reframes to forge a visual link between his figure, the painting, and the statue of the cat, the three principals in the metaphysical exchange. Basil Hallward, disturbed by the changing Dorian, visits him to urge that he return to his former self. As the two speak, the cat sits between them on the table, emblematic of the fate which grips Dorian and separates him spiritually from Basil, even as the golden figure itself separates them physically in the two dimensions of the frame. For Lewin, the objects are, in one respect, the center of the film, and more significant than the human figures which they control; the visual focus is made to underscore that conception. So intent was Lewin on the impact of the objects, particularly the picture of the title, that in the film’s initial release he had Technicolor clips of the portrait spliced into the otherwise back-and-white print.

More than these elaborate visual metaphors, what prevents the melodrama of The Picture of Dorian Gray from degenerating into bathos are the performances of its actors. Angela Lansbury imbues the character of Sybil, consumed with her love for Dorian, with a hopelessness that transcends her pathetic costumes and lower-class accent. Her portrayal, which was nominated for an Academy Award, is stereotyped yet strikingly natural from the moment Sybil first sees Dorian and is so flustered that she skips a line of her song. Playing against the emotionalism of Sybil is Hurd Hatfield’s passivity as Dorian. This was Hatfield’s first, and practically last, major role; he was cast after a much-publicized search for the beautiful youth of Wilde’s conception, and his performance is perfectly suited to the part. His face changes less in expression than in contour and depth under Lewin’s classic lighting scheme.Accordingly, in the scene after he has killed Basil Hallward, which uses only the light of a wildly swinging lamp, a full range of emotions seems to sweep across Dorian’s face with each oscillation. At first, Hatfield makes Dorian a pawn for the forces that manipulate him, but he grows increasingly resolute in his struggle to gain control of his unnatural existence. It is a struggle which culminates in the moment when Dorian plunges a knife into the picture’s heart to sunder his diabolical pact, and, in the process, destroy himself. The performance which is most fully and effortlessly realized is George Sanders as Henry Wotton. Sanders had played Gauguin in Lewin’s The Moon and Sixpence, but well before that he had established a film image as an effete, sardonic, and vaguely threatening snob. His interpretation of Sir Henry renders perfectly the bored decadence of Wilde’s original characterization; he is also the only actor decisive enough to focus and sustain viewer interest in the early part of the film. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945 film) from Wikipedia Differences from the novel * In Wilde’s original, Sybil Vane is a Shakespearean actress

whom Dorian observes playing Juliet, rather than the dance-hall singer seen in this film. This necessitates altering Dorian’s motive for breaking up with her. In the novel, her acting has become shallow as a result of really falling in love with Dorian, and his sense of illusion has been dissipated. In the film, she reacts poorly to his confessions of sensual temptations, which dismays him.

* In the context of those confessions to Sybil, in this film he reads her a poem about cats and sensual temptation which he tells her is “by an Irishman named Oscar Wilde.” It is, in fact, a very short excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx”. Similarly, the use of poetry by Omar Khayam is distinctive to this film.

* The novel has no reference to Dorian being painted with an Egyptian goddess shaped like a cat who could grant his wish, as the film has.

* Dorian Gray’s final speech to Henry in the novel about the soul being non-material but corruptible is one he claims to have heard from a street-preacher. In the film, Dorian hears these words himself from a street-preacher.

* Dorian’s final marriage before his death is to a parson’s daughter in the novel; in the film it is to a girl related to the

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painted Basil Hallward who had a childhood crush on Dorian when he was younger.

The Painting of Dorian Gray The painting entitled Picture of Dorian Gray used in the film was painted on commission during the making of the film in 1943-1944 by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, an American artist who was well-known as a painter of the macabre. Created specifically for use in the film, it is now part of the art collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. Albright had to paint the picture while the movie was being made in order to show Dorian Gray’s physical transformation as his evil actions changed him into a horrid image in the painting while his actual physical appearance remained that of a young man. At the film’s climax, Gray “killed” the painting by piercing it through its heart with a knife, thus killing himself when his physical appearance changed to that of the painting.

Oscar wrote: A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal....Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much....America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up....America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between....Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination....At twilight,

nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets....Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative....Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months....I am not

young enough to know everything....I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability....If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you....Illusion is the first of all pleasures....It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal....Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace....One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation....One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards....Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious....Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow....The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself....The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about....To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity....We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities....Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong....Why was I born with such contemporaries?...Wisdom comes with winters....When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers…..Work is the curse of the drinking classes....I can resist anything but temptation....Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about....Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes....Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality....What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing....Only the shallow know themselves....We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language....A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal....One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason....It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.... I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies....I love acting. It is so much more real than life....Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes....One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing....The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it....

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XX:

Jules Dassin, Night and the City 1950 Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Kon Ichikawa, Biruma no tategoto/The Burmese Harp 1956 Sam Peckinpah, Ride the High Country 1962

Costa-Gavras, Z 1969 Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle 1973

John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence 1974 Stanley Kubrick, The Shining 1980 Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot 1981

Federico Fellini, Ginger & Fred, 1985 Michael Mann, Collateral 2004

Contacts: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...for the weekly email informational notes, send an email to either of us. ...for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/search.html The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with

support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News