Lewin’s Wilde: Aestheticism, Moralism, and Hollywood

Abstract

“Lewin’s Wilde: Aestheticism, Moralism, and Hollywood,” surveys a series of adaptations of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, some strictly faithful and some wildly free to the point of becoming pornographic, before focusing on the most financially successful and aesthetically fascinating, Albert Lewin’s 1945 version. This film was the product of the studio system at its height and of an odd anomaly within it—Albert Lewin, an academic who had long served as Irving Thalberg’s right-hand man at MGM, and thus began his career as a director late in his life and with firm scholarly convictions about the history, artistry, and purposes of film. The result is a curious blend that predictably suppresses Wilde’s scandalous homosexual themes and moralizes in typical Hollywood fashion, and yet, in its own way and in very successful filmic terms, comes very close to Wilde’s subtle purposes in balancing between fairy-tale teachings and art-for-art’s-sake amorality. Lewin even captures some of Wilde’s exquisite aesthetic tension between the temporal narrative and the spatial portrait in his film’s deliberate poising of the high art of black-and-white silent film against the vulgarities of the Technicolor talkie. In short, Lewin’s film is an endlessly surprising and determined effort to explore, in a successful and big-budget studio-era film, idiosyncratic and controversial academic theories such as those set forth by the German scholar Rudolf Arnheim.