The Blog of Dorian Gray

So everything starts out OK. He starts living his life for pleasure and fun, not knowing his wish was granted. He meets and falls in love with Lansbury's character, Sybil Vane, who is a singer in a seedy part of London. She sings a haunting song about not wanting to be a yellow bird captive in even a golden cage. Free, free, free and all of that. So things get hot and heavy, and other things happen, and Sybil Vane dies. Her death is a result of Gray's actions.

However, this grief and guilt does not show on his face. He happens to glance at his portrait and notices a slight change in his likeness' countenance. Kind of a smirk on his face. He decides to hide the painting in the room in his house where he took school lessons – an irony that juxtaposes the innocence of his youth, the innocence that remains on his living face, and the hideousness that shows up in the painting each time he does something awful.

Years go by, and the dude doesn't get any older. However, Gray does some bad bad things. Gray's friend who painted the portrait hasn't seen it in years, and stops by to visit. Other things are discussed, and Gray finally leads his friend upstairs to see what the portrait has become. The artist recognizes his signature on the work, but the horribly twisted figure on the canvas doesn't look like what he had painted years before. When we are allowed to see it, the black-and-white film explodes into color – a device introduced by The Wizard of Oz in the late 1930s. It's nasty, I tell you. And the scary burst of music doesn't help, either.

The artist guy comments on how it sort of resembles Gray, but has contracted "a leprosy of the soul" or some such thing. Gray is gripped by the fear that his longtime buddy will spill the beans on this ugly secret. Of course, Gray kills him, and the portrait reflects the murder as red starts to ooze from the fingers of the painted Gray.

The plot thickens when Gray proposes marriage to the artist's neice. Then at least one other person dies at the hands of Gray's actions. The ugliness crescendos in a sort of redemption – Gray must break off his engagement and rushes home to end the painting's reign over his life.

Gray picks up the same knife he murdered his artist-friend with, and drives it into the heart of the figure in the portrait. Gray himself feels the pain of the cold steel in his chest, and dies. The years of unchanging end as Gray's corpse resembles what was in the painting, and the painting returns to its original state. Freaky. And strangely accurate for 1940s-era special effects.

The message, in my opinion, is that to remain forever beautiful it's what is inside that counts. The characters surrounding Gray thought he contained no evil because his face remained young and innocent. Those who were pure of heart got old on the outside, but remained pure on the inside through the ways they lived their lives. Even when we hide pain and sin from our faces, it still affects us. And old episodes of "Perry Mason" serve to tell us that the truth always gets out one way or another – sometimes in open court.

If there's a modern dichotomy, blogging would fill the bill. We can write whatever we want, but it's our true selves that matters most. Blogging exposes us to new people and worlds we may not otherwise know. But do we really know the people from the "faces" presented? Only the bloggers themselves would know. What a strange, poignant adaption of Wilde's work could be made involving blogging! Except maybe the blog remains rosy and the blogger gets all gnarled and scary-looking.

I highly recommend this film. It's more frightening than anything Hollywood has produced under the guise of horror, because it reaches into us and makes us confront vanity, honesty and the fact that Angela Lansbury was ever hot.