The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) is a black-and-white adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel you can watch online on iFILM. Albert Lewin wrote and directed it. A handsome young man wishes that his portrait would age in his place. The wish is granted, and the trouble begins.

Hurd Hatfield plays Dorian with an eerie, frozen calm — his face never changes while the hidden canvas absorbs every cruelty. George Sanders is Lord Henry, the drawling cynic who feeds him poison dressed as wit. Angela Lansbury, barely twenty here, is the music-hall singer Sibyl Vane, the first life Dorian carelessly destroys; Donna Reed plays the woman who tries, years later, to reach a man who is already rotten underneath.

Lewin shoots the film in cool monochrome, then cuts to the portrait in sudden bursts of color — a trick that lands harder than any makeup effect. Harry Stradling's camerawork took home the Oscar for cinematography, and Lansbury earned a supporting-actress nod. It's slow, talky and quietly venomous, the rare old film whose moral still has teeth. Stream The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) online on iFILM.