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 growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)