Today, a new DVD of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the fabled 1945 version starring Hurd Hatfield and a deliciously evil George Sanders, is being released by Warner Home Video. Besides offering a quality transfer, it includes a new audio commentary from film historian Steve Haberman and Angela Lansbury, who played Sibyl Vane, as well as bonus shorts “Stairway to Light” (1945), “Quiet Please!” (1945); and the original theatrical trailer. This is good news for fans of Dorian Gray the world over.

In honor of its debut, just in time for Halloween, I went back to my own copy of the book — a beat-up old pulp paperback from the 50s — and re-read it.

I began to wonder how many versions have been shot of this still shocking tale. What I discovered is that Oscar Wilde’s offspring Dorian Gray has been immortalized in a dozen or so films, as well as in countless stage productions, musicals and operas. There have been postmodern novels penned about Dorian Gray, academic exposes of his roots in Faust and the myth of Narcissus, scholarly essays deconstructing his eternal allure. The Picture of Dorian Gray has the distinction of being the first novel published (1917) in the legendary Modern Library series put out by Random House. His eerie elan has been revamped by pulp fiction hacks, thriller writers, graphic artists, even romance novelists.

There is an absolute litany of knock-offs of Doriana: children’s books, comic books, cut-out dolls, cartoons, LPs, CDs, and audio tapes all celebrating this unique creation:

Even the masterminds behind Superboy have woven elements of the Dorian Gray myth into their storymaking in an episode when Superboy finds his evil doppelganger in a portrait on an easel (below).

Not long ago a biography was written of John Gray, the handsome friend of Wilde’s whose most memorable literary achievement is the fact that he was (allegedly) the inspiration for Dorian. I’m surprised no one has thought of writing a full-fledged biography of Dorian Gray himself. He’s the perfect anti-hero, worthy of the effort. The added upside would be that his life story would never grow old. (John Gray and Josh Duhamel, below.)

A new film version is apparently in the works starring Ben Barnes, the handsome young lead from Chronicles of Narnia. Producer Barnaby Thompson and director Oliver Parker, who previously teamed to make An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest and most recently co-directed St. Trinian’s are in the middle of production right now. (Ben Barnes, below.)

This on the heels of 2004’s version starring former male model Josh Duhamel which seems to have vanished without a trace. In fact, there are so many new incarnations of Dorian Gray coming out each year that one could actually say that he never died at all, and is still walking amongst us, as young and evil — and dangerous — as he was in fin-de-siecle London.

Few modern tales have made as much of an impact as Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. While not exactly a hit at its inception, it has managed to outlast most of its contemporary literary rivals, becoming as well-known as Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest tales of horror, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Shelley’s Frankenstein; Stoker’s Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

What exactly is it about Dorian Gray that appeals to and fascinates so many generations? Is it the promise of eternal youth? Or the price one has to pay for it? Modern society seems to thrive on building up celebrities with enormous fan appeal, then tearing them off the pedestals on which they’ve been placed and destroying them out of jealousy and revenge. Revenge for what? For reminding us of our own mortality, the loss of beauty and youth, in short our vanity. Dorian Gray is a star because he never grows old. He never disappoints. He never becomes a bore.

There are deeper forces at work in Wilde’s tale than mere vanity of course. Dorian Gray becomes involved in a Faustian battle with sinister powers — which are cleverly never enumerated — harking back to the ancients. It’s a pagan love song of sorts. In order to claim his immortality, Dorian had to sell his soul to the devil, or at least one of his minions. This was amusingly portrayed in the Hollywood version of the 40s by the use of a statue of a cat taken from an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb. Whenever the painting took a turn for the worse, the camera would settle on the cat, as still as stone, with eerie music in the score highlighting its mystery and danger. We never know for sure what caused the painting to grow old instead of its model. But we’re led to believe it was the cat, or perhaps that strange decadent book Dorian keeps reading: A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans.

Oscar Wilde, I think, had simpler parables to preach. It was the act of creating art that Wilde was poking fun at. The artist creates a being out of clay or a bit of paint and it lasts eternally (so long as there is a good art conservator out there) while the subject of the art vanishes into obscurity. Think of Sargent’s masterpiece the portrait of Madame X. She lives on in infamy thanks to the artist’s uncanny knack for exposing her soul, or lack thereof.

As monsters go, Dorian Gray is a bit of a milquetoast. He doesn’t kill that many people. Besides Basil Hallward, who painted the portrait which caused all the trouble, there are practically no victims done in by Dorian’s own hand. Sibyl Vane takes her own life after he disses her performance as an actress. The doctor he blackmails into destroying Basil’s corpse commits suicide. So do many of his rumored sexual liaisons, his opium-eating lovers, his flamboyant fellow decadents. No, Dorian Gray is not a killer a la Jack the Ripper, who did his dirty work for real a few years before Wilde’s novel was published. Perhaps Oscar had him in mind. But Dorian is far subtler. He murders by insinuation rather than by sinning, his ideal beauty the intoxicating poison, as a recent staged play performance indicates (below).

But perhaps, as I noted earlier, Wilde was also commenting on society’s cult of celebrities, himself included. Society is the artist, painting portraits, building monuments, carving figures out of stone like some craven Pygmalion in quest of gorgeous Galateas. Then once the masterwork is done, it destroys it out of spite. This happened to Wilde himself. Perhaps he had a premonition. He certainly masterminded his own defeat. Not only did society bring him down and literally spit on him for his “gross indecencies” (many of which were their own glaring sins) but they also revived him, making Oscar Wilde one of the great immortal figures of literature — a god of style and wit, a martyr for the cause of artists and inverts, the patron saint of gay liberation. He was thrown to the lions for the amusement of the masses, but it is his image of the fallen idol that we worship, not the man himself.

Wilde first wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in July 1890 at the start of his literary career. It was purchased for serialization in Lippincott’s magazine in the United States. It’s ironic that Wilde’s best known and most popular work should have its origins in America — the new world. But that is where Wilde too had made a name for himself, lecturing on aesthetics to the uncouth, and for the most part, charmed masses. Portions of this early, slightly different, but dramatically so, version would come back to haunt Wilde at his trial — or should I say trials — since there were three of them. His attackers read some of the more scandalous lines from the original novella as if they were evidence of Wilde’s personal immorality. The artist was being branded with the sins of his art. Most writers suffer from this problem. A character says one thing and then you find yourself being accused of the very prejudices or moral flaws you were mocking in the text. It’s a no-win situation. But ironically it was these nasty bits that guaranteed Wilde his fame, and the book’s lasting notoriety. For Dorian Gray glamorized horror, making depravity sexy and murder chic. And ironically by not naming “the love that dare not speak its name” which pervades the novel between nearly all of its witty lines, Wilde gave birth to a homoerotic monster that mocks hypocrisy, revealing the naked sinner behind the facade.

For my money, the 1945 film version best captures the exquisite high camp at the heart of this fascinating novel. Despite its being set in a Hollywood fantasy version of Edwardian England, rather than Gay 90s Victorian, it’s stylish and witty and just outre enough that it does justice to Wilde’s intentions. It does veer astray from the original story. The Donna Reed love interest, who first meets Dorian Gray when she’s a child at Basil’s studio, is a creation of the screenwriters, perhaps as a way to further heterosexualize the hero, making the story more palatable to WW2 audiences. It also boasts the best actual portrait of Dorian Gray. TCM explains that it was no accident: “…the hideous portrait…was painted by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. He was hired after director Albert Lewin saw a painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago entitled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. In the film, Albright created four portraits showing Dorian’s gradual dissolution and, in the final scene, where Dorian’s true nature is revealed on canvas, the elegant black and white cinematography suddenly bursts into Technicolor, creating a startling effect.”

Some find Hatfield’s impersonation of Dorian Gray a bit too fey and ghoulish. His skin is as opalescent as moonlight on a marble gravestone. But his spin on Dorian grows on me each time I see it. I also happen to really like the Helmut Berger version — sometimes called The Secret of Dorian Gray — which came out in the 70s. It’s far racier and truer to the spirit of the novel, although it does take liberties. But it deftly takes Dorian out of the closet and into the arms of his admirers, both male and female.

The Australian television version from 1973 starring Shane Briant has some good moments, but overall is wan and ineffectual. The male lead, while certainly attractive, lacks that ineffable mesmerizing quality to fully pull it off.

Peter Firth of Equus fame also took a spin in Dorian’s shoes on BBC but failed to fill them. The producers seemed to think that his having golden curls and a baby face would make up for a lack of aristocratic hauteur, although Jeremy Brett, who would later bring a Dorian Gray-like allure to Sherlock Holmes, plays Basil Hallward with a manic fervor. Sir John Gielgud falls flat as Lord Henry perhaps because he was unconvincing as a married rake.

Apparently Wallace Reid, the silent film star, portrayed Dorian in 1913, the earliest film version listed on IMDB. I have not seen that. Nor have I seen the campy TV version, starring Belinda Bauer and Anthony Perkins in which Dorian Gray is a female film star whose debut screen test ages while she never loses her looks. Fans of vintage smut might recall a legendary 70s porn film, The Portrait of Dorian Gay. I, alas, have not seen it. In 2006, Duncan Roy restyled Dorian Gray with an explicit gay attitude. Starring David Gallagher in the title role, it received lukewarm reviews. (David Gallagher, below).

In other realms, Dorian Gray has been transformed into gothic soap operas. There were shades of Dorian in much of Dark Shadows. Rod Serling’s Night Gallery featured an episode in which a series of paintings depicted the resurrection of a murderous cadaver. Modern novels have incorporated Dorian as one of the undead, a villainous vampire who preys on the young. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire had elements of Wilde’s classic in it, most notably in LeStat’s eternal youth and bisexual glamour. The great British dancer Matthew Bourne, who revitalized Swan Lake by having it performed with an all-male cast, has taken a turn as Dorian Gray.

In opera, Lowell Lieberman retuned Wilde’s tale as a melodious ode to nostalgic yearning. In video games and underground comix, Dorian Gray lives on, a role model to aspiring Goths and sexually confused teens. His sphere of influence keeps evolving. Contemporary photographer Vivica Myers has photographed Dorian Gray as a woman in stylish men’s clothes, while writers have revamped the tale with a gender-bending twist, as has Beth Carpenter in her novel Behind the Eyes of Dorian Gray.

For younger folks, Dorian Gray is simply a character played by Stuart Townsend in Alan Moore’s popular series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which was recently made into a film by Stephen Norrington.

Throughout its history, The Picture of Dorian Gray has inspired artists and illustrators, who’ve been drawn to the meaning of the portrait and its macabre presence: the canvas as flesh, an entity unto itself. which must be vanquished.

And publishers have decorated their book covers with a wide variety of different images depicting the portrait of Dorian Gray. It’s really quite amusing how at odds some of these takes on Dorian are. Some of the book jackets place Dorian in the 18th rather than the late 19th-century. Others show him as an effete ephebe; still others as an overly-groomed fop. One of the stranger covers of late is the one which uses a portrait of the composer Franz Liszt! He was strikingly handsome and a great lover, but I have never thought of him as having a shady past.

There are myriad ways of reading the myth of Dorian Gray. That is part of what makes it so endlessly fascinating. Each person can bring to its gothic conceits his or her own interpretations. A child reading it in a Classic Illustrated comic of yore might be drawn to its fairy tale morals. A teenager reading it in a lurid graphic novel might not glean its moral overtones but come away chilled to the bone by its gruesomeness: a painting which oozes blood and pus and bile. A budding drag queen might see in himself the living representation of Dorian Gray; the creature s/he has painted with makeup and outfitted in garish gowns is the portrait — a reflection of the tormented soul within. No two versions are alike. Wilde unlocked a metaphor that has bedeviled us for over a century — a masterpiece of paradoxes.

No doubt Dorian Gray will live on in infamy for centuries to come. At the ripe old age of 118, he’s still as fetching as ever.