Reviews

This is pretty dire. Just as Italian opera always kicks off with the tenor blasting out an aria, this horse opera has Big John (in thickly caked make-up) miming pitifully to a recorded voice as he strums a guitar in the saddle. From that wobbly start, the film never really improves.

Wayne's character is named John Weston ("western" - get it?) and when he rides into town, he gets involved in the least-convincing shootout you ever saw. Once the basic plot has been established (and believe me, it's basic) what follows is wooden acting and lumbering plot exposition. The film is downright amateurish. When the Duke takes a river trip, instead of cutting from Big John in canoe to the land-based action, the editor gives us the whole laborious process of Wayne disembarking, then clambering up through the undergrowth. The insert of the guy riding shotgun on the stagecoach is oh-so-obviously NOT on the stagecoach. And speaking of "Stagecoach", it is remarkable to note the change in Wayne in five short years. Under Ford's tutelage he grew into a star, and commands the screen in the later film with effortless authority. Here, he is a green amateur.

If anything, the movie goes downhill after Weston sets off on his mission. The rodeo is merely an excuse to fill a third of the reel time with archive footage. The opening cavalcade is interminable, and we get the same stock shot of the crowd over and over again. Needless to say, Weston decides to have a go at this cow-wrasslin', and just happens to smash the calf-roping world record. Dolores the fallen woman (Anita Campillo) makes a play for Weston (there always has to be a Fallen Woman in this kind of film - often a latina, too). How come she's Mexican, when her brother isn't? Our hero snubs the judge's daughter, Marjorie (played by Polly Ann Young) in order to make off with Dolores: it is a scene of the ugliest crudity, and woefully underwritten, with Big John wordlessly walking away from the Nice Girl.

When director Robert N. Bradbury tries for novel effects, he comes a cropper. The punch-up in a blacked-out room may have seemed like a good idea when the movie was being planned in some Pasadena gin joint, but it fails miserably on the screen. It lasts too long and is too irritating for the viewer. In a medium which relies almost exclusively on visuals, black-out is rarely a smart move. And how did Big John get his white hat on in the dark? Composed of tedious medium two-shots, eschewing close-up altogether, the picture lacks cutting rhythm. If Weston and the Marshall are trying so hard not to reveal their alliance, why are they sharing a hotel room? Why does the gang suddenly decide to snub Dolores? Why did Gabby Hayes get the part of the old-timer? Wasn't Walter Brennan in town? Why is the incidental music so strange? How does Big John know that the bad guys are hiding a needle in the saddle, dipped in snake venom? What kind of idiots would try to commit a series of murders by hiding needles dipped in snake venom in cowboys' saddles? Enough already.

Stephen Fry, alleged comedian, claims to enjoy a passing physical resemblance to the real Oscar Wilde (lost on me!) He is also gay. This 1997 film was the culmination of several years' courtship with the Oscar legend, with Fry asserting that he was "born to be Wilde". This bowdlerised piece of saccharine is a serious disappointment. Worst of all, it deliberately dodges the truth.

Every generation concocts its own ways of lying. The 1960 treatment of the same material, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde", managed to avoid all talk of homosexuality - which is rather like making a film about J.P. Morgan without mentioning money. "Wilde" is even more dishonest than that. If your aim is to canonise the man, then you are under a duty to tell the truth.

To the public, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was a writer and late Victorian poseur who went to prison for being a homosexual. From our 21st-century vantage point, his was a kind of martyrdom. It seems barbaric to put a man through disgrace, not to mention two years' hard labour, on account of his sexual preferences. Many people today (particularly media types) are pro-gay, making Oscar a highly suitable candidate for hero. That's the film's big mistake.

The film itself is pretty enough to look at. Production designer Maria Djurkovic has pulled off a tour de force, rendering the period detail with exquisite accuracy. It's a pity that the same can't be said about the screenplay's content. Jude Law's brittle Bosie exhibits the blend of effeminate elegance and semi-demented rage so characteristic of the real-life Lord Alfred, but the stables scene in which the sarcastic son tells the irascible father what he thinks of him is simply not believable. The Marquess was a walking volcano of insane anger, and in real life Bosie was intimidated by him. He only ever sneered at the Marquess from a safe distance ("What a funny little man you are"). The whole point about the historical Marquess of Queensberry is that he was an unstoppable, half-crazed bully. So why insert a fictional scene in which a debonair Bosie gets the better of him? Because this Wilde, the 1997 emanation, has to radiate Christ-like goodness. And his acolyte Bosie has to champion the paragon's cause.

The film's ending is badly bowdlerised. After his release from Reading Gaol, our hero enjoys a blissful reunion with Bosie in sunny Rouen, beneath the cathedral bells. Fade out. Though the two men really did have an encounter in Rouen, it was brief and unhappy. The relationship was over. The three short years left of Wilde's life were spent in absinthe-sodden poverty, cynically corrupting the youth of France. Wilde's end was ugly and miserable, as these film-makers well know, but they choose not to refer to it.

There is an argument which suggests that it really doesn't matter. Feature films are entertainment, not documentaries. Wilde's story is a fable, and can function on the merely mythical plane.

And so it can. But when Wilde (in this screenplay) defines 'la vice anglaise' as hypocrisy, it is ironic, given the hypocritical stance of the film itself.

Take, for example, the courtroom dramas which pop up towards the end. Oscar is a serene hero, a moral giant who (Christ-like again) permits his enemies to immolate him. This is simply not what happened. Wilde, the pampered socialite, chose - against excellent advice - to launch the libel case. When it all went horribly wrong, the fault was wholly his own. In the witness box, Wilde trapped himself with the utterly unnecessary flippancy of his answers. Wilde was no-one's saint. He brazenly lied on oath, and lied to his legal team. He seems an odd choice for a gay icon, this man who so squalidly denied his homosexuality. The real Wilde didn't bravely await his heroic destiny: he sank into morbid indecision.

It gets worse. In this film, we see a dignified Wilde face down two cockney lads who make an affectionate, half-hearted attempt to wring money out of him. The truth was, these were rent boys whom he'd used, and they were blackmailing him ruthlessly. Far from seeing them off, Oscar cravenly coughed up the money. His wife Constance is depicted as a saintly type who forgives him for the devastation he's brought upon her and her sons. No mention here of her changing the boys' names to eradicate the disgrace.

In reality, Wilde was not singled out for an unfair martyrdom. He brought disaster on himself. The arrogant attempt to 'punish' Queensberry failed, and in the process opened him up to criminal prosecution. He had been recklessly flouting the law for years. Plenty of homosexual men comfortably avoided scandal (the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, was sleeping with Bosie's brother). Wilde flaunted his homosexuality, and knew what he was doing.

A modern reader can trawl through the literary works of Oscar Wilde without ever hitting on an unambiguous statement of gay identity. Even "Dorian Gray", which is ABOUT homosexuality, never dares to speak its name. The film could have presented Wilde as he was - flawed, vain, cowardly - and still have captured the tragedy of his downfall. But it took the unimaginative route.

Wilde's Irishness is sometimes trumpeted as redounding to his credit, as if he were a lovable leprechaun, teasing the staid English with the poetry of his charming Gaelic soul. Not so. Wilde was, like the rest of his tiny band of "anglo" exploiters, an absentee rentier with no love for his colonial underlings back in Ireland. He tried to be more English than the English. A rich fop, living off peasants whom he despised, found himself lionised, then spurned, by fashionable London society, because he thought that he alone could live outside the law. Now, THAT would have been a film worth making.