The New Pictures

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Most literary classics and near-classics translate rather stodgily to the screen, no matter how faithful the adaptation. Oscar Wilde's famed and fancy morality legend is an exception. Its epigrams speak even more sharply than they read, and its dramatic essence is vividly visual. But though Writer-Director Albert Lewin, who also did The Moon and Sixpence (TIME, Oct. 19, 1942) deserves respect for a notably hard try, and though his Picture has some elegance, interest and excitement, it falls far short of what it should have been.

Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield), a rich young Englishman of the fin de siecle, was supposed to be the embodiment of youth's beauty and innocence. Artist Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore) was inspired by him to paint his masterpiece. But even as the finished portrait of Dorian stood drying, Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders) infected the young man's mind with the dread of losing his youth and with the amoral desire to seek experience for its own sake.

Standing before his portrait, Dorian said he believed he would sell his soul if only the portrait might take on the penalties of his coming age and experience of evil, and he himself remain untouched.

He got his wish. When he discarded humble Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury) and she killed herself, the mouth of the portrait warped in cruelty. He locked it away, where only he could see it. As the years passed, and he lost himself in every depth, of vice the screen dare hint at, he watched the portrait's gradual and fantastic corruption.* He saw how blood sprang out on the right hand when at length he committed murder.

But at 38 his own face was as young and innocent as ever. At last, however, life and the ghastliness of the portrait proved too much for even his colossal arrogance.

There is a laudable attempt, within M.G.M.'s rather narrow limits, to treat the story realistically rather than as fantasy. Adapter Lewin has been generally discreet in his emendations of the novel. Much of the book's swishiness profitably disappears; most of the still more embarrassing purple patches have been unstitched from the fabric.

And yet, overall, the movie does not come off. Wilde's novel was a fiercely arrogant if troubled fable about the conflict between the individualist and society, between ethics and esthetics. The film lacks almost entirely this basic tension; it lacks also the moral courage and anguish, the satiated melancholy and the intellectual intensity which pervaded

Dorian Gray and Lord Henry and made their story, for all its faults, fascinating and tragic.

Most curious is the neglect of opportunities which, one would think, must have made Dorian seem a tempting movie to make in the first place: the ways in which terror might have been inspired, and a story told, through letting an audience watch an animated oil painting change before its eyes. Even when murder is committed in the same room with the picture, you are not allowed to see red paint sweating forth on the fingers; the camera waits till the crime is complete, then comes back and finds it there. Reverence for literature often goes hand in hand with this singular lack of instinct for cinematic storytelling.

Pan-Americana (RKO-Radio) might easily have been just one more plate of canned, tepid chile con carne served up as a hemispheric good-will offering. But Producer-Director John H. Auer and several of his players have turned it into a rather entertaining and realistic little picture.

Its story: the ace photographer, the most succulent female feature writer, the foreign editor and the female managing editor of a reasonably LIFE-like picture magazine tour Mexico, Cuba and Brazil, gathering orchid buds where they may for a good-neighborly musical revue. Photographer Phillip Terry, Writer Audrey Long and her fiance (Marc Cramer) sweat out the love interest; Editress Eve Arden is primed with metropolitan wisecracks; Editor Robert Benchley explains the samba, and Ernest Truex adds an eerily funny moment as a mad millionaire who likes to cry hopefully to his guests, "Happyhappy-HAPPY!" In the course of their work the tourists watch a Mexican peasant wedding and several pieces of professional entertainment, notably by Miss Brazil (Louise Burnett), who can span three octaves without turning a hair, and Cuba's dionysian Miguelito Valdes, who suggests a three-power compromise between Cab Galloway, Orson Welles and Rube Bandleader Spike Jones.

The love story is as complicated as radar and as contrived as a screen queen's eyelashes. Yet scene by scene, as played by the extremely personable Phillip Terry (third and present husband of Joan Crawford) and by subtly tough Audrey Long, it becomes about twice as real as the run of movie love bouts. The singing and dancing numbers are on the whole refreshingly lacking in Hollywood's normal polish; they have, indeed, a good deal of the seamy vitality of authentic floor shows. Even more authentic is Robert Benchley's sleepy applause, at the end of each number.

*Four canvases representing the stages of Dorian's decay were painted by the famed twins, Ivan and Malvin Albright.

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