Film

The Rake's Progress

Name: The Rake's Progress
Genre: Drama
Released: 1945
Cast: Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Godfrey Tearle, Griffith Jones, Margaret Johnston

A 1945 British drama following a charming, amoral aristocrat's descent through seduction and betrayal in pre-war England. Rex Harrison is magnetic as a man who treats life as a game with no rules and no consequences. It's a character study that works as both comedy and moral inquiry—watching someone wholly without shame navigate a world that expects better of him. For those interested in how cinema portrays cunning and privilege.

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Joseph Losey's corrosive portrait of manipulation and moral decay in a London townhouse. James Fox's weakness and Dirk Bogarde's predatory servant create an atmosphere of creeping depravity that never releases its grip.

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A Man of No Importance1994

Albert Finney as a character living outside society's expectations, shaped by secrets and performance. Less a rake than a man running from himself, but with that same charismatic surface over genuine emptiness.

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A Streetcar Named Desire1951

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Becket1964

Peter O'Toole's Henry II is a rake-king whose charm and impulse to transgress crash against the immovable object of Thomas Becket. Epic in scale but intimate in its portrait of a man used to getting what he wants.

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Wilde1997

Stephen Fry embodies Oscar Wilde's wit and sexual transgression, showing a real genius charming his way toward self-destruction. The gap between his brilliance and his vulnerability is what makes him tragic.

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The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio deliver a sprawling portrait of a man for whom consequence is theoretical. The energy is infectious and the film never pretends his chaos is sustainable—it's watching someone accelerate toward a wall.

But It's three hours of excess that some find exhausting rather than exhilarating. The women are largely objects in Belfort's landscape.

Dangerous Liaisons1988

Glenn Close and John Malkovich as aristocratic manipulators in 18th-century France who treat seduction like warfare. The wit is lethal and the moral reckoning, when it comes, is absolute.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray1945

Released the same year, with Hurd Hatfield as a beautiful man who pursues pleasure and vice while his portrait ages instead. A more supernatural take on the same moral inquiry: what does a life without conscience actually cost?

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Le Samouraï1967

Both are portraits of men who operate by their own code outside society's rules, but where Vivian seduces, Delon's character annihilates—amorality expressed through different violence.

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The Remains of the Day1993

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