Dorian Gray

1961

I’ve spent years trying to find a 1961 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Jeremy Brett which once aired on the BBC. After posting about my interest in the book and film/tv versions recently, I decided to give the search another go.

No luck there, but imagine my surprise when I found this CBS TV 1961 version chock full of interesting tidbits, posted a few months after my September 2018 article.

As I wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Diminishment of Sybil Vane, none of the film versions retained the original intent of Wilde’s story, and all showed disregard for the meaning of art and aestheticism as embodied by the story of Sybil while a rather obscure 1976 television film starring Peter Firth came close to the mark.

But this 1961 TV version from Breck Golden Showcase, while not nearly as good in style, production quality, or adaptation, kept all the of the original intent, and goes to some lengths to establish Sybil as a fine actress who becomes uninterested in her art after she falls in love with Dorian.

It’s short, less than an hour and that includes all the original Breck hair product commercials! So there is a lot to cram in here. The time cost left the witty dialogue and subtlety that the Oscar Wilde original thrives upon on the cutting room floor.

However, there are a lot of fun tidbits in this thing, and the casting of Dorian could not be more perfect.

Actor John Fraser is ridiculously good-looking.

Hello. That’s kind of perfect.

I can’t tell if this is official work or fan art, BTW.

He landed the role, in part because he is beautiful, but also because a year earlier, he played the infamous Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, the lover of Oscar in The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

He’s good. Really, really good as Dorian. His acting has a kind of William Shatner almost over-the-top edge, but it’s appropriate here, and he’s utterly charming even when he’s horrible. If the script were better, I think this movie would really shine, but you get what you get. I prefer him in this role than I do the more famous version with Hurd Hatfield who, at the director’s orders I’m told, played everything so coldly and so remotely he almost left a black hole in the screen.

One of the treats of this little 1961 film is that it is a geek culture scavenger hunt.

Fraser not only had roles in 1982’s Young Sherlock: The Mystery of the Manor House, and a 1981 episode of Doctor Who, but he came to a bad end in the classic horror film starring Catherine Denueve Repulsion.

I’ve also read he was up against Peter O’Toole for the role in Lawrence of Arabia.

But wait! There’s more!

Star Trek fans will enjoy seeing Susan Oliver as Sybil Vane/Hetty Merton! Oliver had a long career, but almost everyone remembers her best as the green-skinned alien girl dancing for Captain Kirk in the 1964 Trek episode “The Menagerie”.

Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas from the hit 1960’s TV show Dark Shadows has a small role as Mercutio playing opposite Sybil Vane. Cedric Hardwicke, the narrator, was also the narrator in the 1945 film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Hurd Hatfield! Frid is in the red circle.

But look closely at the young man in the foreground. That is Star Trek veteran Robert Walker JR, best known as Charlie X, playing Sybil Vane’s brother!

Louis Hayward in the key role of Basil, is all over geek cinema and history: from the 1939 The Man in the Iron Mask, to The Son of Dr. Jekyll, Captain Pirate, The Saint in New York, and The Black Arrow as well as television episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Theater and Night Gallery.

The most unusual casting is George C Scott as Lord Henry Wotton.

Yeah, that George C Scott.

I can barely wrap my brain around Scott as a dissolute dandy, but there you are.

I think you’ll find this short film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray entertaining in a Cliff’s Notes sort of way. While it massacres Wilde’s beautiful language, the original plot and intent are there.

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