Curator Watchlist
A stylish, eerie adaptation that still lands as a vivid morality tale, with a standout use of color for the portrait and a cold, memorable central performance. It’s condensed and a bit choppy, but the atmosphere, visual invention, and Gothic dread make it easy to recommend.
Where to watch: Buy
Sat · 1h 51m
Director: Albert Lewin
Starring: Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, Donna Reed
A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all.
Albert Lewin
Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, Donna Reed
A stylish, eerie adaptation that still lands as a vivid morality tale, with a standout use of color for the portrait and a cold, memorable central performance. It’s condensed and a bit choppy, but the atmosphere, visual invention, and Gothic dread make it easy to recommend.
Albert Lewin’s 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray is elegant, strange, and more unsettling than its polished surfaces suggest. The black-and-white photography, then the sudden eruption of color for the portrait, gives the film a genuinely uncanny charge that still works decades later. It feels like a studio-era Gothic tale that knows exactly when to become a nightmare.
Hurd Hatfield plays Dorian with a chilly, almost insect-like detachment that suits the character’s moral vacancy. The film trims and rearranges Wilde’s novel, so it can feel episodic or compressed, but the atmosphere is strong enough to carry the omissions. George Sanders adds a sly, poisonous wit that helps the movie feel less like a museum piece and more like a decadent warning.
This is best approached as a mood piece and a showcase for visual storytelling rather than a definitive literary adaptation. If you want the full complexity and subversive bite of Wilde’s book, you may leave wanting more. If you want a handsome, haunted classic with one of the great “portrait reveal” effects in horror cinema, it delivers.
eely (3★) · 700 likes
twinks SHOULD live forever
nina (3★) · 519 likes
much straighter than anticipated :/ feeling: betrayed
Jaime 🏳️🌈✨ (3★) · 445 likes
So obviously this is objectively way better than the 2009 adaptation but this one also doesn't have Dorian kiss Basil at a sex party so really which is truly superior
Hesse (4★) · 384 likes
When it showed the painting I lost my shit. Also so funny when he reads the poem and says “it was written by a brilliant Irishman out of oxford named Oscar Wilde” lol
evilbjork (3★) · 250 likes
I just know everyone in the audience in 1945 was blown away when it revealed Dorian Gray's portrait and it was in color. I mean, even 80 years after its release, I was impressed by that.
A refined Gothic horror film that turns repression, beauty, and corruption into something deeply unsettling.
For its elegant Gothic atmosphere, psychological menace, and polished studio-era suspense.
A masterclass in haunted-house dread with a strong sense of unseen rot beneath the surface.
Another classic studio horror built around beauty, concealment, and tragic obsession.
Dreamy, melancholy, and uncanny, with a similarly poetic approach to fantasy and dread.
Expressionist horror about psychological distortion, visual stylization, and moral unease.
A moody early thriller with a strong sense of obsession, guilt, and shadowy menace.
A classic tale of split identity and hidden depravity that pairs well with Dorian Gray’s themes.
A tragic monster film about inherited doom, inner corruption, and sympathy for the damned.
A suspenseful Gothic thriller with a dark, ornate atmosphere and a sense of lurking evil.
For its period elegance, psychological manipulation, and oppressive sense of moral decay.
A shadowy, stylish horror film about hidden lives, dread, and the pull of corruption.
vanity, moral corruption, double life, decay beneath beauty, Gothic horror, temptation, aestheticism, repression
classic horror, Gothic drama, moral decay, supernatural curse, studio-era cinema, black-and-white photography, early color effects, literary adaptation, psychological horror, decadent atmosphere