![Oscar Wilde: Picture of Dorian Gray [VHS]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ZD5EG5JSL.__AC_SX300_SY300_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
I had to watch it backwards as well as forward, because the VHS (or my Zenith player) would NOT fast rewind, nor continue to rewind moderately fast--I had to keep egging it on. Anyway, Dorian walks funny. He goes somewhere, and then poses there. He does it over and over ("having the gait of neither pagan, Christian, nor man"--Hamlet). And, although he acts well enough, he seems VERY young...when he or his friends say that Sybil is only 17, you think, why, he's hardly more than that himself!
Aside from that, the acting is fine, but I thought John Gielgud was wasted in the part of Harry, who drops one aphorism after another (he starts the sentence, and I finish it with him). This is the man who said "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' (Tempest). "O God! Methought--what pain it was to drown!" (Clarence in Olivier's Richard III). "If it be not to come, then it will be now...the readiness is all." (Hamlet.) "Pray you--undo this button..." (Lear). Harry is not a man of FEELING. Gielgud plays him fine (though you do sense a kind of forcing in the eternal aphorisms..he could have been a little less jolly with them--as he was in "Arthur." He achieved humor with a straight face.)...but he should be doing something else. (Also, in the beginning, he wears far too much makeup. I even wondered if the movie was in black and white, and had been colorized). Only the last time he sees Dorian, and, an old man, troubled finally by the lack of change in his friend, he touches Dorian's hand--Dorian pulls his hand away. "You have changed...but not in appearance," he says sadly.
Also, I felt the movie was a bit cramped. In the book, we hear the men talking while Sybil performs so badly, talking in the theater..there's no theater. And isn't his encounter with her brother (18 years later) outside? The movie wants some fresh air!
I remember, with the earlier "Dorian Gray," I was disturbed because Ivan Albright's paintings were SO modern...picky, picky.
Go ahead and buy it; you may enjoy it. It is quite faithful to the book, although perhaps a bit rushed. It has been years since I saw the first one, but I think I like it better--the black and white photography as well.
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Be sure to see Peter Firth in Roman Polansky's "Tess," 1979. He's excellent, and walks like a human being as well.
他の国からのトップレビュー
Julie Vognar
I...didn't like it very much.
2008年6月29日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
"humtdumt"
The Picture Of Dorian Gray
2003年6月7日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
