WAIT UNTIL DARK 1967

Before there really was such a thing as a high-concept movie, in 1967 Warner Bros. released this doozy of a nail-biter whose intriguingly unorthodox casting and high-concept thriller premise resulted in lines around the block and a boxoffice ranking as the 16th highest-grossing film of the year. The film: Wait Until Dark. The casting: All the heavies are played by actors best known for comedy roles. The concept: Somebody wants to kill Holly Golightly!

Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix

Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, Jr.

Richard Crenna as Mike Talman

Jack Weston as Sgt. Carlino

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix

As if drawn to the theater for the collective purpose of forming a militia in her defense, sixties audiences—long-accustomed to spending a pleasant evening being charmed by the winsome, doe-eyed, Belgian gamine of Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany's—turned out in droves to witness Hepburn as a defenseless blind woman tormented by a gang of sleazy, drug-dealing, New York thugs. The Old-Hollywood zeitgeist had shifted in a big way! And if you don’t think placing cinema’s much-beloved eternal ingénue within harm’s way is a concept both incendiary and controversial, you must have missed the 2010 online war raged against Emma Thompson when she dared to utter but a few disparaging remarks about everyone’s favorite sylphlike waif.
Thompson, at the time writing a since-shelved remake of My Fair Lady, drew the heated ire of millions when she expressed the opinion that Hepburn couldn't sing and “Can’t really act.” Ignorant or indifferent to the fact that, at least on this side of the pond, anyone trash-talking Audrey Hepburn is just begging for a major ass-whippin’; Thompson made herself no friends in Hepburn camps. There's no reason to believe there's any connection between this public outcry and the fact that Thompson's My Fair Lady re-up hit a snag, but if there’s one thing Audrey Hepburn elicits from movie fans, it’s the near-unanimous desire to shield and protect her. A quality exploited to entertainingly nerve-racking effect in Wait Until Dark.

"What did they want with her?"
Poster art for Wait Until Dark prominently featured the image of a screaming Audrey Hepburn accompanied by the above tagline.  Yikes!

From the moment I first saw her in Roman Holiday, I've always thought of Audrey Hepburn’s screen persona as akin to that of a butterfly. A creature so exquisitely fragile and beautiful that you couldn't bear seeing harm come to it. Sure, Hepburn was drolly menaced in Charade, and most certainly, pairing the then 27-year-old Hepburn with 57-year-old Fred Astaire in Funny Face constitutes some form of romantic terrorism; but for the most part, Audrey Hepburn has always seemed to me to be a woman far too adorable and classy for anybody to mess with.

That being said, I don’t number myself among her fans who would have been happy to have seen her continue along the path of taking on the same role in film after film. When Hepburn made the heist comedy How to Steal a Million in 1966, she was 36 years old, a wife and mother, yet still playing the sort of girlish role she virtually trademarked in the fifties. While that particular comedy revealed Hepburn in fine form and as radiant as ever, it was nevertheless becoming clear that in a world that was making way for Barbarella, Bonnie Parker, and Myra Breckinridge; it was high time for the Cinderella pixie image to be laid to rest.

Taking on the role of the tormented blind woman in Wait Until Dark was a concentrated effort on Hepburn's part to broaden her range and break the mold of her ingénue image. Earlier that same year Hepburn appeared to spectacular effect opposite Albert Finney in Stanley Donen’s bittersweet look at a troubled marriage, Two for the Road. Giving perhaps the most nuanced, adult performance of her career, Hepburn in modern mode revealed a surprising depth of emotional maturity that signaled, at least for a time, she might be one of the few Golden Age Hollywood stars able to make the transition to the dressed-down '70s. While Two for the Road ultimately proved too arty and downbeat for popular tastes, Wait Until Dark was a resounding boxoffice success and garnered the Oscar-winning actress her fifth Academy Award nomination.

Wait Until Dark was adapted from the hit 1966 Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder) which starred Lee Remick in the role that won her a Best Actress Tony nomination. Recreating the role she originated on Broadway, actress Julie Harrod (above) portrays Gloria, the bratty but ultimately resourceful upstairs neighbor.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I really love a good thriller. And good thrillers are awfully hard to come by these days. When a suspense thriller succeeds in its objectives to send a chill up my spine, keep me guessing, or, better yet, induce me to spend a restless evening sleeping with all the lights on…well, I’m pretty much putty in its hands and will willingly follow where I’m led. Wait Until Dark does a marvelous job of duplicating the formula that worked so well for Ira Levin in both Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, two of my all-time favorite suspense thrillers. Wait Until Dark takes a vulnerable female character (a woman recently blinded in a car accident, just learning to adapt to her loss of sight); pits her against an enemy whose degree of malevolence and severity of intent she is slow to recognize (Susy is the unwitting possessor of a heroin-filled doll her tormentors are willing to kill for); and (most importantly) takes the time to develop its characters and methodically build suspense so as to best to encourage empathy and audience identification. Simple in structure, yet rare in its ability to sustain tension while providing plenty of nightmare fodder, Wait Until Dark is one of those scary movies that still packs a punch even after repeat viewings.

When it comes to strict adherence to logic, most psychological thrillers don't hold up to too-close scrutiny. Wait Until Dark is no exception. Plot points and theatrical devices that play well on the stage don't always translate to the hyper-realistic world of motion pictures. But when a thriller is as fast-paced and full of spook-house fun as Wait Until Dark, head-scratchers like the one above (I won't give anything away, you'll have to see the film) won't hit you until long after your pulse has returned to normal and the film has ended. 

PERFORMANCES

A while back I wrote about how refreshing it was to see Elizabeth Taylor tackle her first suspense thriller with 1973’s Night Watch. In thinking back to 1967 and my first time seeing Audrey Hepburn’s genre debut in Wait Until Dark, the word that comes to mind is traumatizing. Yes, it was quite the shock seeing MY Audrey Hepburn keeping such uncouth company and being treated so loutishly in a film without benefit of a Cary Grant or Givenchy frock for consolation. Like everybody else, I had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn’s frail vulnerability in Funny Face and My Fair Lady, so seeing her brutalized for a good 90 minutes was a good deal more than I was ready for at the tender age of ten. 

Javier Bardem's creepy psychopath of No Country for Old Men owes perhaps a nod to Alan Arkin's equally tonsorially-challenged, undies-sniffing nutjob in Wait Until Dark. 

Over the years, my shock over Hepburn’s deviation from type has given way to an appreciation of the skill of her performance here. Actors never seem to be given the proper credit for the realistic conveyance of fear and anxiety, yet I can't think of a single thriller or horror film that has ever worked for me if the lead is unable to convince me that he/she is in genuine fear for their life. Audrey Hepburn delves deep into her somewhat underwritten character and makes her more than just a "lady in peril." She authentically conveys her character's mounting apprehension and fearful response to the circumstances she finds herself facing, yet never abandons the innate resourcefulness that has already been established as part of this woman's makeup as a survivor. 

Hepburn is the emotional linchpin of the entire movie, and she is incredibly affecting and sympathetic. Without benefit of those expressive eyes of hers (she somehow allows them to go blank, yet finds ways to have all manner of complex emotions play out over her face and through her body language) Hepburn keeps us locked within the reality of the film. Even when the plot takes a few turns into the improbable (once again, my lips are sealed!). 

Sixties model Samantha Jones (yes, Sex and the City fans, there IS a real one) plays Lisa, the inadvertent catalyst for all the trouble that erupts in Wait Until Dark. Jones' fabulously '60s big-hair, big-fur, slightly cheap glamour seems to have been borrowed by Barbra Streisand's working girl ("I may be a prostitute, but I'm not promiscuous!") in 1970s The Owl and the Pussycat.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Having been born too late to experience the mayhem attendant the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho with that famed shower scene, I'm therefore thrilled to have had the experience of actually seeing Wait Until Dark during its original theatrical run, when exhibitors turned out all of the theater lights during the film's final eight minutes. Jesus H. Christ! Such a thunderous chorus of screams I'd never heard before in my life! My older sister practically kicked the seat in front of her free of its moorings. At least I think so. I was on the ceiling at the time. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that while that experience has since been duplicated at screenings I've attended of the films Jaws, The Omen, Carrie, and Alien; it has never been equaled. At least not in my easily-rattled book.

I hope William Castle appreciated the irony
At the exact moment director William Castle - the great-granddad of horror gimmickry - was making a bid for legitimacy with Rosemary's Baby, Wait Until Dark, a major motion picture with an A-list cast, was attracting rave notices and sellout crowds employing a promotional gambit straight out of his B-movie marketing playbook.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Audrey Hepburn ventured into the damsel-in-distress realm just once more in her career (with this film's director, Terence Young, no less). Unfortunately, it was in the jumbled mess that was Bloodline (1979). An absolutely dreadful and nonsensical film I've seen, oh, about 7 times. As theatrical thrillers go, Wait Until Dark is not up there with Sleuth or Deathtrap in popularity, but it does get revived now and then. Most recently, a poorly-received 1998 Broadway version with Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino, of all people. In 1982 there was a cable-TV adaptation starring Katherine Ross and Stacy Keach that I actually recall watching, but, perhaps tellingly, I can't remember a single thing about.

As a kid, I only knew Jack Weston from the silly comedies Palm Springs Weekend and The Incredible Mr. Limpett. Richard Crenna I knew from TV sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks and The Real McCoys. Producer Mel Ferrer (Mr. Audrey Hepburn at the time) is credited with casting these two talented actors against type to refreshingly unsettling effect

When people speak of Wait Until Dark, it is invariably the Audrey Hepburn version that's referenced, and it's this film to which all subsequent adaptations, like it or not, must be compared. Even when removed from the fun exploitation gimmick of the darkened theater and the novelty of seeing Hepburn in an atypical, non-romantic role, Wait Until Dark holds up remarkably well. Delivering healthy doses of edge-of-the-seat suspense and jump-out-of-your-seat surprises, it's a solid, well-crafted thriller with a talented cast delivering first-rate performances (save for Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who just does his usual, bland, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.thing).
Still, it's Audrey Hepburn—age 37, inching her way toward adult roles— who is the real marvel here. Being a movie star of the old order, one whose stock-in-trade has been the projection of her personality upon every role; Hepburn is never fully successful in making us stop thinking at times as if we're watching Tiffany's Holly Golightly, Charade's Regina Lampert, or Roman Holiday's Princess Ann caught up in some Alice-through-the-looking-glass nightmare. But in these days of so-called "movie stars" who scarcely register anything onscreen beyond their own narcissism, I'm afraid I'm going to favor the actress whose sweetly gentle nature has shone through in every role she's ever assumed. That's a real and genuine talent, in and of itself.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013

BYE, BYE, BIRDIE 1963

Sure, Bye Bye Birdie is a bright, lively, tuneful, only intermittently funny satire of teenage pop culture in the '60s. But as far as I’m concerned, Bye Bye Birdie has two huge assets (I know what you’re thinking…and you should be ashamed of yourself!) which make it one of my all-time favorite movie musicals. Those assets: the unstoppable star-quality of Ann-Margret, and the snappy musical staging and choreography by Onna White. 

Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee

Bobby Rydell as Hugo Peabody

Dick Van Dyke & Janet Leigh / Albert Peterson & Rose DeLeon

Mary LaRoche & Paul Lynde / Doris and Harry McAfee

Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie

Adapted from the 1960 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie pokes gentle fun at America’s burgeoning youth culture by spoofing the real-life pandemonium surrounding hip-swiveling pop star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1958. Standing in for Elvis in the musical is the fictitious rocker Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson): a beer-swilling, ill-mannered, libidinous hillbilly who wreaks havoc on prototypical Midwestern small town, Sweet Apple, Ohio when he arrives to bestow a symbolic coast-to-coast televised goodbye kiss on an adoring female fan before being shipped overseas.

Cue the generation-gap complications and small-town vs. show-biz culture clash hijinks. None of which, I might add, should anyone having even the most cursory familiarity with '60s-era sitcoms should have trouble staying one step ahead of. Bye Bye Birdie, when it’s either singing or dancing, is the most engaging and sprightliest of musicals, full of fun and as eager to please as a puppy. In its quieter moments—scratch that, there are no quieter moments—in its non-musical moments, Bye Bye Birdie's amusing, if not particularly funny, screenplay feels a tad labored and more than a little creaky.
Rooted in a kind of broad, over-emphatic acting style of most sixties sitcoms (a style that struck me as riotous when I was nine, a good deal less so now) and over-reliant on moldy, near-vaudevillian comedic shtick of the sort that considers silly names (Hugo Peabody) and wacky plot contrivances (that deadly speed-up pill subplot) the height of comedic brilliance; Bye Bye Birdie stays afloat chiefly through its simple desire to entertain and because of the buoyant charm of its talented and energetic cast.

The Sweet Apple chapter of The Conrad Birdie Fan Club 
(fronted by Ann-Margret and Trudi Ames) pledge undying allegiance.

The film version of Bye Bye Birdie was significantly (and, as per the voiced consensus of Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton, controversially) retooled from the stage production. Primarily a middle-aged romance (Albert & Rosie) against a satirically rendered teen-culture backdrop, the Broadway production was nominated for eight Tonys, winning four: Best Musical, Best Director, Best Choreography, and Best Actor (Van Dyke). By the time it reached the screen, what was essentially a Dick Van Dyke showcase was fashioned by director George Sidney into a $6 million valentine to vivacious protégé Ann-Margret.
This was Ann-Margret's third film (she made her debut in Pocketful of Miracles, and assumed the Vivian Blaine role in the 1962 remake of State Fair), but thanks to Sidney's loving attention and her heretofore peripheral character being thrust to the film's center, Bye Bye Birdie is the movie most people credit with making her a star.

What began life as an anti-rock & roll musical fashioned to reflect the middle-age mentality of adult Broadway audiences reeling from rock & roll upstarts like Elvis stealing the Sinatra crown, arrived on the screen as a youth-centric glorification of teenybopper culture that effectively allocated once-prominent adult plotlines and relationships to the sidelines to make way for the fresh vitality of its young cast members (aka Ann-Margret). With Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde the only carry-overs from the Broadway show, numerous songs jettisoned and plotlines abandoned or reworked; Bye Bye Birdie became the ironic embodiment of all that the Broadway play had spoofed. Bye Bye Birdie, hello to the first multimillion-dollar teenage musical!

Paul Lynde's comedic number, "Kids" was a showstopper that brought down the house on Broadway. When speaking of his much-abbreviated screen role, Lynde was fond of saying of the film, "They should have retitled it, 'Hello, Ann-Margret'!" 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One look at Bye Bye Birdie and it’s easy to see why it has become one of the most imitated and referenced movie musicals since The Wizard of Oz. Each number in the bouncy Charles Strouse / Lee Adams score is given almost cartoonishly vibrant life in increasingly clever and dazzlingly cinematic ways. So many large-scale musicals fall into the trap of thinking that mere size and expense is enough to make a film fun and energetic; Bye Bye Birdie is that rare example of a musical whose scale perfectly fits its subject, and whose accumulated talents (dancers, singers, cinematography, color, choreography, staging, and minor special effects) all remain on the same creative page. Every number throughout is infused with a lighthearted wit and silliness that remains true to the escapist tone of the entire enterprise. The effective musical film is almost a lost art, but Bye Bye Birdie is a glowing example of the genre done right. Small wonder that musicals like Grease and Hairspray, and entertainments as diverse as music videos, TV’s Mad Men, and Disney’s High School Musical franchise, have all owed a debt to Bye Bye Birdie.

The combined talents of director George Sidney (Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun) and choreographer Onna White (The Music Man, Oliver!) result in a movie whose clever, eye-popping musical sequences are a great deal of silly fun and still have the power to delight and captivate after all these years.

"The Telephone Hour (Going Steady)" predates the look of MTV music videos; "Put on a Happy Face" makes imaginative use of cute, if primitive special effects; and "A Lot of Livin' to Do" is a powerhouse production number of unparalleled energy and witty choreography.

Oscar and Tony Award-winner Maureen Stapleton makes her musical debut in
Bye Bye Birdie as  Mae Peterson, Albert's dominating mother.

PERFORMANCES

In her 1982 book 5001 Nights at the Movies, fave film critic Pauline Kael wrote the following about Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie...and I couldn't have said it any better: “Ann-Margret, playing a brassy 16-year-old with a hyperactive rear end, takes over the picture; slick, enameled, and appalling as she is, she’s an undeniable presence.” 

OK, I might have left out “appalling.”

Real-life teen idol Bobby Rydell makes his film debut as Ann-Margret's love interest

Beyond that, Kael pretty much nails Ann-Margret’s appeal for me in this film and why any director would have been a fool not to have kept the camera trained on her every second. She's a dynamo! Members of the film’s cast may have felt slighted, and fans of the stage show may cry foul, but in my book, if Bye Bye Birdie is remembered at all today, it’s due in large part to Ann-Margret. The material is just too ordinary as it is. She is camp, a little over the top, and perhaps artificial as hell, but she is blessed with that indefinable something that makes it near-impossible for you to watch anyone else when she's on the screen. She’s a star.

In the Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie paid tribute to iconic, stone-faced TV host Ed Sullivan  in the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening." Director George Sidney snagged the genuine article for the film (that's him on the left, for all of you youngsters).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There aren't many lines across which the life experiences of gays and straights of my generation intersect, but one thing that many males (and a good many females) my age have in common—regardless of sexual orientation—is the memory of their first time seeing Ann-Margret singing the film’s title song. Whether we saw it on the big screen in full color or in black and white on our TV sets, like the Moon Landing, few of us ever forgot or recovered from that image. Wow!

At the start of the film, Ann-Margret's performance of "Bye Bye Birdie" is girlish and plaintive. When she reprises the song at the end of the film, her performance has become assured, teasing, and not a little sexually aggressive.

The fifties had Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate, but we children of the sixties had Ann-Margret on that treadmill. A sequence so obviously tame, perhaps it's a testament to our nation's level of sexual repression at the time that Ann-Margret, in those few short minutes at the start and end of the film, made men, women, children, straights, gays, lesbians, and adolescents of all stripes fall in love/lust with her.
The first time I saw Bye Bye Birdie was in black & white on late-night TV. I remember being just thunderstruck (I'm positive my jaw dropped open). I'd never seen anything like her! Advancing and retreating against that endless void, wind machine a-blowing...Ann-Margret was nothing less than a celluloid Venus emergent.

The dancer assuming the puppy hands pose with Bobby Rydell here is Lorene Yarnell, 
who found fame in the '70s as half of the popular mime duo, Shields and Yarnell.

The blonde staring agog at Jesse Pearson is '70s TV personality and Match Game stalwart, Elaine Joyce. Pearson himself would go on to write and direct porn films in the '70s until his untimely passing in 1979 at the age of 49. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As I've stated, Bye Bye Birdie is one of my favorite movie musicals, but primarily due to its songs, musical sequences, and the rapturous presence of Ann-Margret. I have no complaint with anyone in the cast except to say that they're sorely ill-served by the weak script and they're all goners when it comes to having to share any scenes with Miss You-Know-Who. Predictably, I'm finding that the older I get the more certain aspects of the film seem to strike me as charmingly camp or comically dated. Some of these things are fun: the middle-class suburban milieu, the fashions, all those rotary phones. Other things less so: the all-white cast, that Shriner's Ballet when it starts to get out of hand (the 2009 Broadway revival removed the number entirely claiming, in the words of its star Gina Gershon, "It seemed a little too gang rape-y").

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
When I saw Bye Bye Birdie on the big screen for the first time in the 80s, the film's biggest laugh came from the intentional misunderstanding of this sweet, totally innocent lyric. 

So whether enjoyed as camp, escapism, or an idealized journey to a past that never existed, Bye Bye Birdie is, at 50-years, still the most fun-filled musical around. And best of all, it has Ann-Margret!

This great caricature is the work of Pete Emslie

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

DORIAN GRAY 1970

Playwright Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in 1890), has been adapted to film at least ten times, not counting several silent versions and numerous movies made for television. Of these, I've seen a kind of low-rent, Dark Shadows-esque version produced by Dan Curtis in 1973; a visually well-turned-out and significantly altered 2009 British theatrical adaptation for the Twilight generation; and the uniformly excellent 1945 film version which boasts George Sanders playing what is essentially Addison DeWitt five years before there was an Addison DeWitt.

Each film possesses its own unique assortment of assets and liabilities, but by no stretch of the imagination could any be labeled the definitive translation of Wilde's allegory of the corporeal vs. the spiritual. So, being that as far as I know, the definitive adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray has yet to be made, I proffer this, my absolute favorite version of Wilde's oft-told-tale: the irresistibly loopy Dorian Gray - 1970. It is a film that stands head and shoulders above the rest for its appealingly tawdry Eurotrash aesthetics, flawless evocation of Swinging '60s mod, and its flagrant, unabashed sleaze factor.

Loaded with entertainment value every bit as visually exquisite and shallow as its protagonist, Dorian Gray (titled The Secret of Dorian Gray or The Evils of Dorian Gray in Europe) is a deliciously prurient Italian/German collaboration produced by American schlockmeister Samuel Z. Arkoff (the "brains" behind virtually every Beach Party or outlaw motorcycle gang movie made in the '60s) and released through his American International Pictures.

Helmut Berger as Dorian Gray

Herbert Lom as Henry Wotton 

Marie Liljedahl as Sybil Vane / Gladys Mormouth

Richard Todd as Basil Hallward

Margaret Lee as Gwendolyn Wotton

Directed by onetime Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallamano, Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's Victorian Gothic provocatively updated to Swinging Sixties London at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. It remains reasonably faithful to the novel's Faustian plot concerning a handsome young innocent --led down the path of hedonism and debauchery-- whose portrait comes to reflect the decay of his soul, while he himself remains the unsullied ideal of youth and beauty. This Dorian Gray is, in every and all aspects, a Dorian Gray that could only have come out of the late '60s.

Mac Daddy Dorian

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

There is something conceptually so perfect about positing Dorian Gray smack in the middle of the youth-obsessed '60s. Removed from the wholesale repression and prudery of Victorian-era morality, this particular incarnation proposes what seems to me to be a far more compelling question: When arbitrary ethical judgments of good and bad are replaced with the freedom to do what one wishes in a world that worships self-fulfillment, beauty, youth, and living for today, of what authentic value is a moral code?

In the year this film was released, folk rocker Stephen Stills had a Top 20 hit with a song whose lyrics espoused the then-popular "free-love" philosophy: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." (Which in itself is a retooling of an E.Y. Harburg lyric from a song from the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian's Rainbow: "If I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near.”) The timbre of the times literally reflected the philosophy of Dorian Gray's Hedononist-in-Chief, Henry Wotton: life is to be enjoyed freely and openly, and youth is a briefly bestowed gift best utilized to its fullest while one possesses it.

Prince Charming and Juliet
Prior to embarking on a long-term love affair with himself, Dorian falls into
idealized love with virginal (albeit not for long) aspiring actress Sybil Vane

The '60s atmosphere of moral relativism would seem to suggest that this particular incarnation of Dorian Gray was perhaps conceived as a means of addressing Oscar Wilde's themes in a manner relevant to the changing times. An opportunity to reflect upon what distinctions exist, if any, between being liberated and being a libertine. Alas, from the film's first Giallo-influenced frames (Giallo being a stylized genre of Italian thriller), it's clear that this Dorian Gray is less interested in exploring the complex themes of aestheticism vs. morality so much as exploring how far the newly relaxed standards of cinema censorship can be pressed into the service of chronicling Dorian's heretofore only-hinted-at depravities and sins of the flesh.

Desire Under the Elms

PERFORMANCES
Italian cinema's long history of dubbing and post-synching dialog frequently makes it tough to access actors' performances. Dorian Gray's multi-national cast speaks its dialogue in English, but the entire film is dubbed by other actors (save for Herbert Lom, who provides his own voice). This might spare audiences the sometimes ear-gnarling clash of dueling accents you get with many international productions, but it also tends to rob performances of a great deal of their vitality. This is especially true of the dynamic and charismatic Helmut Berger, who possesses a sexy, melodic voice and whose charming Teutonic lisp (he's Austrian, actually) I greatly miss.

Action films and mostly-silent spaghetti westerns fare better under this practice, but a dialogue-heavy film like this — with its attempts at Wilde-ishly witty banter — makes for a particularly clumsy aural experience. The effect of all these somewhat flat, disembodied voices is that already dodgy performances are rendered thoroughly ineffectual (I'm sorry, but lovely Marie Liljedahl seems like a pretty awful actress in any language), and potentially good performances (Berger, Isa Miranda, Renato Romano) are de-fanged and neutered. In its place is a form of acting I tend to associate with those Hammer horror films from the '60s: underlined and over-indicated to the point of pantomime.

"Do you want to sell it, Mr. Gray?"
In a minute, randy millionairess Patricia Ruxton (Isa Miranda) 
will make it obscenely clear she isn't talking about real estate

Happily, Dorian Gray, having been fashioned as an erotic exploitation film from the get-go, isn't really a film fueled by its performances. Like a trash novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jacqueline Susann (fans of Valley of the Dolls would love this), Dorian Gray is a movie devoted to surface gloss. And on that score - from its photogenic cast, sumptuous color photography, lavish locations, outrageous mod costuming, and climate of glamorized sleaze - Dorian Gray more than delivers.

Tearoom for Two
Dorian Gray, Sexual Outlaw

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A hurdle for any screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the casting of a Dorian whose looks correspond to enough people's wildly subjective notions of male beauty so as not to render the narrative absurd, or at the very least, puzzling. For my money, director Dallamano hits pay dirt with the casting of Helmut Berger. A man so staggeringly beautiful that he makes personal fave Joe Dallesandro (certainly one of the most gorgeous men to have ever walked the planet) look like Ernest Borgnine.

Something not possible in earlier adaptations, contemporary Dorian Gray becomes a porn star!

Protégé and life partner of director Lucino Visconti, Berger appeared prominently for the director in The Damned, Ludwig, and Conversation Piece. Dubbed by the press at the time as the most beautiful man in the world, Helmut, smooth, slim, and marvelously devoid of tattoos, was like the Richard Gere/Ewan McGregor of his day: he couldn't keep his clothes on.
In the '70s, female stars were jumping out of their clothing in record numbers, but one had to rely almost exclusively on Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films to catch male nudity of any consequence. Lucky for us connoisseurs of male pulchritude, Helmut Berger obligingly doffed his trousers in film after film. A fact that certainly leaves me wondering to what degree my affinity for this film is tied to the filmmakers taking every opportunity to feature our leading man in various states of undress. I'll have to think about that.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Someone once said, "Everyone has trash, but what distinguishes us is the quality of our trash," (it sounds like something John Waters would say). I apply this philosophy to my taste in movies. I'm well aware that a great many of the films I get the biggest kick out of are films many would perceive as pure cinema trash, but there's not a soul in the world who could convince me that my particular brand of trash isn't some of the most superior trash you're likely to come across. It's often the very best that the worst has to offer.

The striking actress Beryl Cunningham portrays Adrienne, Dorian's amoral partner-in-blackmail

In Dorian Gray, you have the typical youth-directed sexploitation stuff American International released with assembly-line regularity in the '60s and '70s (Three in the Attic, Angel, Angel, Down We Go), only this time cloaked in the veil of literary significance. In most aspects superficial (those centering on the libidinous exploits of Dorian), the film does right by its conceit in updating the tale to modern times. But it fails to go much below the surface in examining even a fraction of the ideas and concepts its premise suggests.
Curiously, it's the passing of time which has granted Dorian Gray the subtextual gravity it lacked in 1970. Albeit perhaps, uncomfortably.

Actor Helmut Berger has gone on record about his disdain for Los Angeles and Hollywood, and has thus, outside of a small part in The Godfather: Part III and a year's penance on TV's Dynasty in 1983, mostly worked in Europe. High living (literally...drug and alcohol abuse) eventually got the better of him, and like Marlon Brando, that other physical specimen who ceased to care for maintaining a youthful appearance for the comfort of his fans, Helmut did the unspeakable...he allowed himself to age naturally.

Renato Romano portrays Dorian's boyhood friend, Alan Campbell, a chemist

Certainly his current condition is to some degree a result of youthful excesses, but at almost 70 years of age, part is merely due to a thing that has become increasingly rare among public figures: actual aging. A phenomenon practically unheard of in Hollywood, our culture reveres beauty so completely that an individual who allows his looks to "go" is considered more a figure of pity than one who pathetically clings to eternal youth.
Personally, I find Helmut Berger's current relaxed-into-himself countenance very refreshing, and it speaks of a self-image perhaps a good deal healthier than the plastic-surgery nightmares that proliferate in Hollywood today. I've read many online comments about how sad it is that Berger has failed to maintain his looks as he ages, but little speculation along the lines of how he might be happier and more at peace with himself now than in his cocaine-thin days.

Helmut Berger in his 60s  /  Berger at 25 

The questions about inner vs. outer beauty that Oscar Wilde dramatized so artfully years ago (and if you've never read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I heartily recommend it) are still with us... maybe now more than ever. In our looks-obsessed culture in which beauty is so often seen as a virtue, is youth really a thing worth trying to hold onto forever, prizing it above all? And what value does beauty have to the possessor (we on the outside benefit from gazing upon it) if there's not also peace of mind? It's a pity that Dorian Gray, an exploitation film distracted by its own sensationalism, failed to delve deeper into the many questions raised by its enduringly appealing premise.

But take a look at the film now, through the prism of 43 years having passed. Like a real-life Dorian Gray, Helmut Berger in this movie provides a record of himself in a state of near-perfect youth. A moving portrait frozen, unchanging, and captured on film for all time. Knowing now what we couldn't have known in 1970 (what ultimately becomes of Helmut's celebrated beauty, his battles with drugs and alcoholism, and the toll they take on his face, body, and mind) raises the very issues Oscar Wilde's novel proposed all those years ago, and makes us question our own attitudes about beauty, aging, and the value we place upon such things.

"The world belongs to the young and beautiful," Wotton tells Dorian. Perhaps that's true. But it's ownership with a very short lease. Beauty is indeed something, but it's sobering to ponder, when considering Helmut Berger's troubled life and how little peace his good looks brought him, how obviously beauty isn't everything.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013