Production
The film was directed by Gregory Ratoff and produced by William Kirby, from a screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the play Oscar Wilde by Leslie Stokes and Sewell Stokes. Original music score was by Kenneth Jones.
The film starred Robert Morley as Oscar Wilde, Ralph Richardson as Sir Edward Carson, Phyllis Calvert as Constance Wilde, John Neville as Lord Alfred Douglas, Dennis Price as Robbie Ross, Alexander Knox as Sir Edgar Clarke and Edward Chapman as the Marquess of Queensberry.
This was one of two films about Wilde released in 1960, the other being The Trials of Oscar Wilde. They were both released in the last week of May.
Author and former film extra, Brian Edward Hurst, gives a detailed description of a scene he witnessed during filming where Morley (as Wilde) attempted to pick up a newspaper boy on a foggy London street. Hurst's book: Heaven Can Help - the Autobiography of a Medium describes the day's filming at Walton-on-Thames Studio.
The attempted seduction scene was cut from the final version. This movie was a lower budget production which was compared unfavorably with the wide-screen, technicolor version The Trials of Oscar Wilde.
Read more about this topic: Oscar Wilde (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)