ABSTRACT
The surge of interest, both during and immediately after World War II, in bringing Oscar Wilde’s works to the screen was driven largely by the involvement and impetus of Jews. One year before Albert Lewin’s version for MGM of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) came the very loosely adapted comedy, The Canterville Ghost (1944), written by Edwin Blum and directed by Jules Dassin—the latter an American of Russian Jewish parentage, whose career began in the Yiddish Theatre. Four years after Dorian, Otto Preminger, the Jewish director from Austria who had arrived in Hollywood in 1935, directed The Fan, a Hollywood adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Meanwhile, in Britain, the first cinematic version of a work by Wilde either during or after the war years was the 1947 An Ideal Husband, directed by Alexander Korda, who was from a Hungarian Jewish family. Should we see these many examples of Jews working to revive Wilde’s fiction and plays and bringing them to new audiences in the 1940s as mere coincidence? Or were there political and social, as well as artistic, reasons behind this phenomenon? This essay will consider how and why Jewish artists working in cinema acted, at a moment in history when Jewish identity represented peril and persecution, to reclaim and rehabilitate Oscar Wilde and to make him newly popular with mass audiences. Even as the film industries in Hollywood and Britain remained silent about the experiences and fates of contemporary European Jews, the promotion of the historical figure of Oscar Wilde as a Great Writer served as an oblique way to address the subject of stigmatized and persecuted identities and to argue for a new embrace of “difference.” In the ever-so-cosmopolitan personae, moreover, of both Wilde and of his literary characters, Jews—who had been accused of being “cosmopolitan” types themselves and thus of belonging to no nation—could find their cultural doubles, while bringing together Wilde’s world and their world.
