This British film-in a splendidly restored Technicolor print from London's National Film and Television Archive-is as droll and stylish as its source. In fact, director Anthony Asquith's unswerving adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic steadfastly refuses to overshadow the play's innate wit, charm, and class with any distracting cinematic dazzle. Written in the late 1890s, the play fixates on the manners and morals of the pretentious and the manor-born, skewering all and sundry with Wilde's epigrams and nasty asides. Spit out, stated dramatically, or muttered politely, the words are brought to life in a joyous flurry of understated malice by a cast of England's finest stage and screen actors, including Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, and the particularly lovely Edith Evans.