OSCAR WILDE (1960)

The story of Oscar Wilde's undoing, largely at his own hands, is told in a straightforward but rather boring way, though the performance by Robert Morley as Wilde is quite good, perhaps still the best screen Wilde. Filmed at a time when homosexuality was still a taboo issue in films, the movie largely pussyfoots around the topic, though the word "sodomite" does crop up, and though no sex or even lovey-dovey behavior is seen, it's pretty clear what’s going on. At a performance of his play Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde makes eyes at young Lord Alfred Douglas (John Neville) and, in a moment that would be right at home in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the besotted Douglas tells Wilde that the play has been the greatest experience of his life. Douglas is being blackmailed because of some incriminating love (or lust) letters he wrote to a boy who later killed himself. Wilde (who is married with children) helps him, and he and Douglas then become "involved." Though Wilde's friends counsel him to be careful about the affair, he and Douglas aren't, and soon Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensbury, sends Wilde a note in public accusing him of "posing as a sodomite," and Wilde recklessly sues him for libel. The courtroom scenes, near the end of the movie, grow repetitious, though Morley and Ralph Richardson, as the Marquis' lawyer, spar well together. Morley is especially good as he begins certain that his wit will win the court over, then slowly realizing that he no longer has the upper hand. The unrepentant Wilde ended up going to prison, and the film ends with Wilde in Paris a few years later, reading from the Bible. A rather colorless film, even if it does hit the high points historically. The same year, another movie, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, was released covering the same ground with Peter Finch as Wilde. The critics seem to have found it a better movie than the Morley version, though it's been so long since I've seen it that I can't say how I felt about it. Pictured are Morley and Neville. [TCM]