[NOTE: On hiatus in New York, researching a new project. Therefore, for the time being, I am resurrecting another older piece, this one about The Lodger, which seems very apt now since the new movie version by David Ondaatje, starring Simon Baker and Hope Davis, below, opens today.]

Ladykiller: The Story of The Lodger

A tall dark stranger. Loads of London fog. A coquettish showgirl. The back streets of Whitechapel. A debonair inspector. And Jack the Ripper. These are the ingredients that have made Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger such an eternal favorite.

First published in McClure’s magazine in 1911, the mystery, soon issued in book form in 1913, cleverly preyed on the public’s fascination with the Ripper case, which remained unsolved (and still is, despite what Patricia Cornwell might want us to think), and played off the paranoia and hysteria that arise when a ruthless serial killer is on the loose. Lowndes was the sister of the author Hilaire Belloc. And while she may not have had his subtle flair for literature, she had the equally valuable common touch. Her book has been in print since it was first published. In fact, four films have been made based on her novel.

Recently I’ve been on something of a Lodger kick. While researching the wonderful, but now nearly forgotten, actor Laird Cregar, I discovered that the Fox film, The Lodger, was finally out on DVD and available on NetFlix. I leapt at the chance to view it. Starring some of my favorite Hollywood stars, including Merle Oberon, as the disarmingly beautiful showgirl, and George Sanders, as the devastatingly debonair detective, Fox’s 1944 version of the Lodger stands out as arguably the best in the series. But it is Laird Cregar’s performance that makes the film so worth watching. Physically a cross between Vincent Price (particularly his slightly whispered, gentleman’s voice) and Raymond Burr (especially Burr’s soulful eyes and bulk), Cregar is in a league of his own.

Breathing new life into the stereotype of Ripper as a madman, Cregar imbues his character with uncanny pathos and cunning. While it is evident from the beginning of the film that he is in fact the killer, one is drawn to him, just as Merle Oberon is, despite his ungainly physique (Cregar was over 300 pounds at this point), and bizarre personality.

Cregar starts off slow but gradually reveals his character in flashes of brilliance. There’s one scene in particular in which Cregar shows Oberon a small painting of his “brother.” It’s a self-portrait that the artist made, showing a devilishly handsome young man (who looks nothing like Cregar at all). Cregar goes off on a mad monologue about how beautiful his “brother” was, oozing a disconcertingly incestuous and homoerotic obsessiveness that isn’t really in the script. It’s all in the way Cregar delivers the lines — and in his eyes. It is a chilling scene that transports this film from being a typical Hollywood Gothic thriller into a realm of Poe-like surrealism that transcends the genre. And which also makes it uniquely ahead of its time. Blaming the cause of a serial killer’s rage against women on his repressed homosexual urges had not yet become a tired Hollywood cliche.

The same can also be said of the first two Lodger films that starred the great English musical star Ivor Novello. I could go on at length about the appeal of this amazing persona.

Little known today in America, Novello was on a par with Noel Coward in England, writing musicals, starring in films, penning unforgettable songs, producing elegant theatrical spectaculars. He even found the time to write the screenplay for the original Tarzan, The Ape Man film (starring Johnny Weissmuller)! And not only that, he was devastatingly handsome. In the 1920s, Ivor Novello was one of the most instantly recognizable faces in the world.

The first Lodger film was a stylish silent movie directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, in 1926. It can be seen as one of his first masterpieces. And the first in a long line of thrillers. Hitchcock had had another success with Novello in the marvelous silent Downhill. Unfortunately, because of Novello’s popularity, the Lodger story was changed, making Novello merely a suspect in the Ripper case, rather than the actual killer himself. This worked well for Hitchcock’s purposes, as he was a master at creating suspense out of ordinary daily experiences. But the story lacked some punch. Today it is best known for its striking cinematography and Novello’s riveting performance.

In 1932, Novello remade The Lodger, also starring himself. But this time he made it as a talkie. It is similar to the Hitchcock version, but lacks the ingenuity and mise-en-scene that Hitchcock first gave it. Still, it is worth watching since it is one of the few films in which we can hear Novello actually talk. And even without Hitchcock, it holds one’s attention.

A decade later, The Lodger was taken up by director John Brahm, and writer Barre Lyndon, and given the Hollywood treatment. For me this is the most satisfying version for the reasons already given. Laird Cregar’s creepy performance in the Ivor Novello role. George Sander’s unctuously couth inspector. (He would have made a brilliant Sherlock Holmes.)

And where else can one see Merle Oberon dance a can-can?! But most of all it is the brilliant direction of John Brahm, who was known for the early horror film The Undying Monster. The lighting in this version is absolutely breathtaking. When one of the victims is getting ready to go to bed in her squalid flat, she suddenly realizes there is a man in her room. The camera pushes her back against the wall and she covers her face with her hands, letting out a bloodcurdling scream. It is one of the most horrifying scenes ever caught on celluloid, similar in tone to some of the best work by James Whale.

Later, towards the end of the film, there’s a memorable scene in which Cregar is crawling along a catwalk above the stage where Merle Oberon is performing. The light thrust up between the rungs of the crosswalk illuminates Cregar’s face in a pattern of quickly moving bars, eerily reminiscent of the light cast by a silent movie projector. Is this a subtle homage to Hitchcock? Or just a brilliant device? Moments later, when Cregar is backed up against a wall, his face is framed in a painfully harsh light that reveals the tormented monster he truly is.

Brahm and Cregar went on to capitalize on the box office success of The Lodger by crafting a sequel of sorts: Hangover Square.

While not about Jack the Ripper, it tells the story of a psychopathic composer who kills uncontrollably when he suffers spells caused by shrill sounds. It’s a real hoot. And while it doesn’t quite rise to the level of The Lodger, it has some devastating moments. Cregar lost over a hundred pounds prior to taking the role. And boy does it show. He is surprisingly handsome here and the loss of extra weight seems to have freed him to act in new directions. Alas, it was because of his rapid weight loss that Cregar died shortly after making the film.

Why producers felt it necessary to remake The Lodger again in 1953 is beyond me. And why cast Jack Palance as the Ripper? He is so obviously creepy that it undermines the suspense. But this film version, called The Man in the Attic, is worth watching as a counterpoint to the other versions.

Using the same script as the Cregar version, it is almost identical in some shots. I even wondered if they had used some of the footage from the earlier film. There’s one scene where a Bobby is looking for the killer on a rooftop and is attacked by pigeons that is identical to the previous one. Even the costumes seem to have come from the same distributor. But there are very important differences. The showgirl here, played by the very beautiful Constance Smith, sings with a dubbed-in saccharine 50s voice that sounds so canned that it almost smells of sardines. And there’s a bit more flesh. It hardly seems possible that in Victorian England, an actress would strip down to her birthday suit to take a bath on stage.

One of the odder “updatings” is that the character of Smith’s dresser at the theatre is now written as a dour woman from India. Why this change? Was this some underhanded reference to Merle Oberon (seen above in one of her “exotic” moods) who starred in the previous version? Oberon’s Indian heritage was a well-known Hollywood “secret.” And as revealed in the biographical novel Queenie by Michael Korda, based on Oberon’s life, her mother posed as her servant. Perhaps if the film were better, one’s mind wouldn’t wander off on such far-fetched tangents!

The most appalling change is that here, instead of being madly in love with his “brother,” the Jack Palance character shows us a small painting of his mother, an actress who became a streetwalker in Whitechapel when she fell on hard times. The detective informs us that the Ripper’s first victim was this woman, his mother. This is an absurd twist, and a vain attempt to explain his behavior. And worse, it’s a far cry from the odd homosexual psycho-drama that plagued Cregar in his much better version.

In the Jack Palance version, Edward, the Prince of Wales, comes to hear the showgirl perform. This is an ironic touch since years later books would be written claiming that it was Edward’s son, Prince Albert, aka “Eddy” who was actually Jack the Ripper.

So my advice to anyone who cares is that the next time you take a room at a hotel on a business trip or vacation, bring along a copy of The Lodger — and any of its four (make that five) film versions — and curl up in your bed while enjoying it. But make sure to leave the light on.

Every Halloween some jack o’lantern out there on the internet comes up with a new list of his ten favorite horror movies. I thought I’d give it a shot and do the same. But I could not limit myself to merely ten titles. You try it! So I’ve decided on my 50 faves, arranged alphabetically below.

Putting together any list of scary movies is a daunting task, and a highly problematic one. For instance, should one include films that are frightening, but essentially grounded in another genre? War of the Worlds (the original, not the tragic remake) might make the list, but calling it a horror film somehow takes away from its topnotch sci-fi credentials and its status of being inspired by two non-horror geniuses: H. G. Wells and Orson Welles. Likewise, I can’t watch To Kill a Mockingbird without being scared to death during the scene where Boo is hiding behind the door. But that doesn’t make it a horror film. And what of a film like Psycho which I see is on many people’s lists? I am certainly terrified while watching it, especially at its shriekingly bizarre climax, but it’s much more a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition than my own pick, Maniac, which used a similar idea but in a much more horrific vein, and featured extraordinary work by master makeup artist Tom Savini.

Then what is one to make of a film like Freaks? This masterpiece by Tod Browning, who also directed the brilliant Dracula, was marketed as a love story, not a horror film. But its candid depiction of carny life (cast seen above) freaked out audiences in the 30s when it was first distributed. The film was immediately pulled from theatres and only became a cult classic decades later. Same with the extremely eerie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell, who glamorized the world of ballet in The Red Shoes. A film about voyeurism, Peeping Tom was banned in some cities and wasn’t rediscovered until the 70s after its horrific content was no longer as controversial. It’s still difficult to watch however.

As for the bucket of blood-letting pix in the 70s and 80s, they do little for me. What makes a film scary is suspense, not splatter. Think of The Spiral Staircase starring Dorothy McGuire. What the director did with lighting and sets is far more frightening than anything in the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street series. I would have included it here, but ultimately it’s a thriller and a mystery, not a horror picture, and I think The Uninvited, which deals with real ghosts rather than serial killers, is a much better example of the genre. Today’s horror films, Saw and Hostel, for example, strike me as merely lessons in audience disdain. These are exploitation flicks in the worst sense and offer little in the way of artistry or style. If they were funny, they might have some redeeming quality. But they don’t fit the “so-bad-it’s-good” criteria that make a horror film a classic. A good example of that is the hilarious X, below, starring Ray Milland. He also appears in Frogs which is better than laughing gas.

Sometimes a remake is better than the original. Some felt that way about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And The Fly. I beg to differ. The Paul Schrader Cat People was pretty good, but in my book, the best remake was The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter (of Halloween fame) which improved upon the silly “intelligent carrot” concept of the original by Howard Hawks.

You might differ with me on some of my choices. The low-budget Fear No Evil, filmed in Alexandria Bay in New York’s Thousand Islands (and in Boldt Castle) is rarely discussed in lists of good horror films. But like Martin, by George Romero, it revolutionized the idea of what a vampire movie could be. It came out around the same time as The Evil Dead which received accolades and made its director a star. But I find Fear No Evil a much more innovative movie. Another forgotten vampire classic is The Velvet Vampire starring Michael Blodgett. Set in the desert of the Southwest, it breathed new life into an aging genre by using shocking sex and 60s hip counter-culture trappings with wit and style.

I am not sure why I’ve included three Brian DePalma movies (Sisters, Carrie and The Fury), and left out Phantom of the Paradise, one of his best movies. It’s campy and scary but somehow it just didn’t give me the chills the other three selections have. Same with Rocky Horror Picture Show, which deserves to be on many lists but not on this one. I might be stretching a case here or there for the sake of argument and in generating an intelligent debate. Plan 9 From Outer Space is usually confined to the list of the world’s worst movies. But when I saw it as a child on Chiller Theater it almost made me into a raving lunatic. I was haunted by its imagery even though I couldn’t follow the story. Seeing Vampira pass through a cemetery still gives me the creeps.

In most cases, rather than listing a title, I’ve used the film poster as an illustration. But to liven things up a bit and to make this list more of a puzzle, I’ve used some stills from the pictures. See if you can name the film based on the photo I’ve chosen. Please also keep in mind that in some cases I’ve included movies that are simply favorites of mine for reasons that have nothing to do with how truly scary they are, but in how campy or funny they can seem. Joan Crawford’s Berserk and Strait-Jacket won’t keep you up at night but they’ll certainly cause you to laugh your head off.

And which is my favorite? That’s hard to say. Depends on one’s mood. But if I were to look back on my entire film viewing experience, there’s one movie that stands out and lingers in my memory. Carnival of Souls. Set partly in an abandoned amusement park outside Salt Lake City, Carnival of Souls (seen below) was a drive-in indie that despite its minuscule budget created an atmosphere of unbearable gloom. Its eerie organ score set the dark, menacing tone. Even now, just thinking about its ghoulish hitchhiker gives me shivers.

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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.