There have been several renditions of the trials (and tribulations) of Oscar Wilde but this is the best. "Oscar Wilde," starring Robert Morley, had appeared two years earlier and was more typical of the way films had to stomp history into a Procrustean bed in order to fit the time slot and please the audience. As Wilde, Morley isn't a pouf but a sensitive soul. He's put on trial and spouts all the apothegms of Wilde's characters as if they were appearing for the first time, improvised on the spot.
This version, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde", is longer, more demanding, more historically true, and generally superior. It's informative too. There wasn't "a" trial of Oscar Wilde; there were three trials all in all, one in which he was the plaintiff, one in which the crown prosecuted him and ended in a mistrial, and a third in which he was convicted and sent to Reading gaol ("jail", folks) for two years, during which he lost his wealth, his social status, and his family, and went into exile in Paris.
It's not a comedy. At the height of his powers, Wilde has a pretty wife and two children whom he loves. He's also having an affair with the handsome young Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Whether the affair is Platonic or assumes more physical dimensions, we never find out. Nor in the end does it matter.
We don't get to hear the evidence brought against Wilde by four or five scalawags whose integrity is in doubt. Presumably their testimony involved sodomy, delicately expressed. But their stories are tainted enough that we can conclude Wilde was convicted because he LOOKED and ACTED queer. He was tried in the press and was guilty. This was in 1893 in Victoria's notoriously prudent England, but it happens all the time. We're quick to leap on the suggestion of guilt in popular figures. America has just done it now in the case of a once popular entertainer, Bill Cosby. "Schadenfreude" was Freud's word for it, the pleasure taken in seeing others suffer.
Most of the characters are given two dimensions except perhaps for the Marquis of Queensberry, the reliable Lionel Jeffries, who is a flat-out, half-deranged sadist. The proximate cause of Wilde's trials, the extraordinarily handsome Bosie, John Fraser, is a moral imbecile, a psychopath, but like other psychopaths he's good at scanning others and generating sympathy for himself. All that's keeping him from being thoroughly "evil" is a German umlaut.
Two events are understandably left out. One is Wilde's experience in prison. He did hard time in the sense of back-busting physical labor. Yet he managed to produce one of his better-known poems, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," from which we get lines like: "Yet each man kills the things he loves" Another absentee is Wilde's death in a modest Paris lodging house, a place he loathed. A visitor found him dying in his bed, staring at the wall. And Wilde said, "Either this wallpaper has to go or I do." He's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery along with Chopin, Molière, Jim Morrison, and (most aptly) Helois and Abelarde.
I found the acting, the writing, and the direction all pretty much above what I'd expected. As Wilde, Peter Finch has to be very careful, as if walking a tightrope. He never acts effeminate except in dire situations, threatened by a knife or pummeled by unwanted visitors. As Bosie, Fraser is a perfectly spoiled and selfish brat. James Mason makes a brief appearance as the court's prosecutor, the guy who was Wilde's classmate at Oxford. ("No doubt he'll treat me with all the bitterness of an old friend.") It's hard to recall a better written summary of the defense than that given by Nigel Patrick as Wilde's barrister and it's difficult to beat Wilde's definition of "the love that dare not speak its name" while on the stand.
It's a superior movie.
This version, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde", is longer, more demanding, more historically true, and generally superior. It's informative too. There wasn't "a" trial of Oscar Wilde; there were three trials all in all, one in which he was the plaintiff, one in which the crown prosecuted him and ended in a mistrial, and a third in which he was convicted and sent to Reading gaol ("jail", folks) for two years, during which he lost his wealth, his social status, and his family, and went into exile in Paris.
It's not a comedy. At the height of his powers, Wilde has a pretty wife and two children whom he loves. He's also having an affair with the handsome young Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Whether the affair is Platonic or assumes more physical dimensions, we never find out. Nor in the end does it matter.
We don't get to hear the evidence brought against Wilde by four or five scalawags whose integrity is in doubt. Presumably their testimony involved sodomy, delicately expressed. But their stories are tainted enough that we can conclude Wilde was convicted because he LOOKED and ACTED queer. He was tried in the press and was guilty. This was in 1893 in Victoria's notoriously prudent England, but it happens all the time. We're quick to leap on the suggestion of guilt in popular figures. America has just done it now in the case of a once popular entertainer, Bill Cosby. "Schadenfreude" was Freud's word for it, the pleasure taken in seeing others suffer.
Most of the characters are given two dimensions except perhaps for the Marquis of Queensberry, the reliable Lionel Jeffries, who is a flat-out, half-deranged sadist. The proximate cause of Wilde's trials, the extraordinarily handsome Bosie, John Fraser, is a moral imbecile, a psychopath, but like other psychopaths he's good at scanning others and generating sympathy for himself. All that's keeping him from being thoroughly "evil" is a German umlaut.
Two events are understandably left out. One is Wilde's experience in prison. He did hard time in the sense of back-busting physical labor. Yet he managed to produce one of his better-known poems, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," from which we get lines like: "Yet each man kills the things he loves" Another absentee is Wilde's death in a modest Paris lodging house, a place he loathed. A visitor found him dying in his bed, staring at the wall. And Wilde said, "Either this wallpaper has to go or I do." He's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery along with Chopin, Molière, Jim Morrison, and (most aptly) Helois and Abelarde.
I found the acting, the writing, and the direction all pretty much above what I'd expected. As Wilde, Peter Finch has to be very careful, as if walking a tightrope. He never acts effeminate except in dire situations, threatened by a knife or pummeled by unwanted visitors. As Bosie, Fraser is a perfectly spoiled and selfish brat. James Mason makes a brief appearance as the court's prosecutor, the guy who was Wilde's classmate at Oxford. ("No doubt he'll treat me with all the bitterness of an old friend.") It's hard to recall a better written summary of the defense than that given by Nigel Patrick as Wilde's barrister and it's difficult to beat Wilde's definition of "the love that dare not speak its name" while on the stand.
It's a superior movie.