Wilde, a harmless bisexual playwright (Morley) is married and has two children. He falls for a handsome young man, Lord Alfred Douglas (Neville), and their affair is indiscreet. The young man's father is the irascible Marquis of Queensbury -- as in "Marquis of Queensbury Rules" -- who has mistreated his son all his life and now, faced with Alfred's complete lack of pudeur, becomes practically apoplectic. He insults Wilde openly. Wilde challenges him in court, loses, spends two years in Reading Gaol, and when he is released retreats to Paris under a new inconspicuous name ("Sebastian Melmoth", inconspicuous), produces little more of value, dies an impecunious alcoholic, and is buried among other artists in a famous cemetery. You can visit his grave.
Wilde's problem was not so much his sexual orientation but his amour fou. Lord Alfred Douglas, "Bosie", was a more complicated creature than Wilde's fantasies had shaped. He hated his father and, at least according to this film and the play on which it's based, used Wilde as a tool to irritate and humiliate his old man.
The original play was by Frank Harris, who led a mighty interesting life himself. (See "My Life and Loves", a minor scandal in its time.) The difficulty is that the play doesn't work very well. This is Victorian England. The visuals cry out for period detail and there isn't much of it -- just a walk in what was called fog then and would be called smog now.
I don't know what Wilde's trial was like but in this film, Wilde treats his courtroom experience as a kind of joke, which no one else does. They're entirely serious about "bringing him to justice" while he stands up there in the dock and defends himself with quips and apothegms that are, in fact, drawn from his written work. Every joke of substance he ever made is jammed into his indignant and bewildered appearance before people who hate his guts.
The film, like the play, is evasive and full of talk. "Homosexuality" is never heard. I don't think "sex" is either. "Unnatural" is used, and so is "Sodomite," which a hotel porter has to look up in the dictionary, only to find that it means "unnatural." Wilde's time in the slams was no joke either. He was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and hard labor is what he got. The film shows only a few seconds of Wilde lying on a bed in a dark room, looking sad. And one of Wilde's best jokes is missing. Stricken with a fatal illness, on his death bed, Wilde was visited by a friend, and he remarked that "either this wallpaper has to go or I do." Robert Morley, regrettably, isn't right for the part. He's fine as part of an ensemble but he can't carry a movie by himself. Further, he's too old, and too plump, even immediately after his release from prison. He comes across as a fussy old fuddy duddy throughout. Wilde should be tall, languorous, deliberate and a little contemptuous. He should be wide around the hips, like a Beardsley drawing, not around the belly. They've even trimmed Morley's hair in 1960's fashion. The director, Gregory Ratoff, lends little to the proceedings. We need a new treatment -- not of Harris's play but of Wilde's life, done by people with a bit of poetry in their souls.
Wilde's problem was not so much his sexual orientation but his amour fou. Lord Alfred Douglas, "Bosie", was a more complicated creature than Wilde's fantasies had shaped. He hated his father and, at least according to this film and the play on which it's based, used Wilde as a tool to irritate and humiliate his old man.
The original play was by Frank Harris, who led a mighty interesting life himself. (See "My Life and Loves", a minor scandal in its time.) The difficulty is that the play doesn't work very well. This is Victorian England. The visuals cry out for period detail and there isn't much of it -- just a walk in what was called fog then and would be called smog now.
I don't know what Wilde's trial was like but in this film, Wilde treats his courtroom experience as a kind of joke, which no one else does. They're entirely serious about "bringing him to justice" while he stands up there in the dock and defends himself with quips and apothegms that are, in fact, drawn from his written work. Every joke of substance he ever made is jammed into his indignant and bewildered appearance before people who hate his guts.
The film, like the play, is evasive and full of talk. "Homosexuality" is never heard. I don't think "sex" is either. "Unnatural" is used, and so is "Sodomite," which a hotel porter has to look up in the dictionary, only to find that it means "unnatural." Wilde's time in the slams was no joke either. He was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and hard labor is what he got. The film shows only a few seconds of Wilde lying on a bed in a dark room, looking sad. And one of Wilde's best jokes is missing. Stricken with a fatal illness, on his death bed, Wilde was visited by a friend, and he remarked that "either this wallpaper has to go or I do." Robert Morley, regrettably, isn't right for the part. He's fine as part of an ensemble but he can't carry a movie by himself. Further, he's too old, and too plump, even immediately after his release from prison. He comes across as a fussy old fuddy duddy throughout. Wilde should be tall, languorous, deliberate and a little contemptuous. He should be wide around the hips, like a Beardsley drawing, not around the belly. They've even trimmed Morley's hair in 1960's fashion. The director, Gregory Ratoff, lends little to the proceedings. We need a new treatment -- not of Harris's play but of Wilde's life, done by people with a bit of poetry in their souls.