The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) Queer Film (A)

DIRECTOR: Albert Lewin

We all know the story: a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, wishes that his portrait might age in his place. As he plunges into a life of corruption and hedonism, the painting grows monstrous while Dorian himself remains eerily untouched—until the accumulated weight of his sins finally destroys him.

After serving as Irving Thalberg’s closest assistant and winning an Oscar for producing Mutiny on the Bounty, Albert Lewin became a producer at Paramount following Thalberg’s death at 37. A man of pronounced literary ambition, Lewin soon stepped into writing and directing, debuting with a middling adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence. But back at MGM, he created his masterpiece: a superb adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the impossibly beautiful Hurd Hatfield as Dorian. Hatfield’s performance—so subtle it borders on the mask‑like—has always felt exactly right. He’s like Tyrone Power with the emotional temperature dialed down to zero.

Lewin handles the material with exquisite control, and the film stands as one of MGM’s finest achievements of the 1940s. The production design is sumptuous, and Harry Stradling’s Oscar‑winning black‑and‑white cinematography is breathtaking—erupting into color for the climactic close‑up of Ivan Le Lorraine Albright’s grotesque portrait, now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The cast is superb. George Sanders is perfection as Lord Henry Wotton—Wilde’s heterosexual stand‑in—scattering epigrams like rose petals. Angela Lansbury, in her second Oscar‑nominated performance in as many years, is heartbreaking as Sybil Vane, the young woman whose destruction seals Dorian’s fate. Richard Fraser is excellent as her vengeful brother, and Peter Lawford and Donna Reed look impossibly fresh and luminous.

And then there is Basil Hallward, Dorian’s closest friend and the man who paints the fateful portrait. He is played by gay actor Lowell Gilmore, who—like Hatfield—deserved far better from Hollywood. His quiet ache gives the film its emotional center, the one place where Wilde’s original queer longing still flickers through the studio gloss.

MGM

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