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Gaslight movie1/13/2024 ![]() Lewis’s “My Name is Julia Ross” (1945), Vincente Minnelli’s “Undercurrent” (1946) and two Anatole Litvak 1948 melodramas, the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle “Sorry Wrong Number” and Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit.” “Gaslight” was dramatized on the radio and satirized on TV. In addition to Hitchcock’s two kindred gothics, other versions of this female noir included Joseph H. Still, when the film finally made its tardy way to the United States in 1952, Crowther found it inferior to the Cukor version: “The street sets are plainly artificial, the atmosphere seems laboriously contrived and the direction of Thorold Dickinson is perceptibly casual and slow.”īy then, the plot became overly familiar. More than a tough little thriller, the 1940 “Gaslight” is a sardonic portrait of a bad marriage between a couple that turns out to not even be married. (Cathleen Cordell is a lot tawdrier than Lansbury as well.) There’s a terrific bit of business where the pair go off to the music hall to catch some French cancan dancers. Unctuously pious, he’s clearly unhinged as well as openly predatory in making the housemaid his mistress. Walbrook malevolently lords over his pathetic wife (Diana Wynyard). Bergman’s bravura performance aside, the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more economical (running half an hour shorter), more brutal ( opening with the murder of an elderly woman and the killer ransacking her flat), and a lot nastier. Like the movie’s horrible husband, MGM had a reason. The studio tried to destroy all prints that the first “Gaslight” survived at all may be credited to the director Thorold Dickinson’s foresight in making a personal copy. Hollywood rewarded her with an Oscar and Alfred Hitchcock, who had made two analogous gothic thrillers, “Rebecca” (1940) and “Suspicion” (1941), in which Joan Fontaine coped with a sketchy spouse, cast Bergman in two upcoming pictures, “Spellbound” (1945) and “Notorious” (1946).įor its part, MGM undertook to gaslight audiences by pretending that the British movie never existed. ![]() It’s remarkable that, as robust a presence as she is, she convincingly plays a timorous victim. More than anything, “Gaslight” is a testament to Bergman’s acting skills. Girlishly trusting, passionately in love, tragically confused, hysterically terrified and implacably vengeful by turns, she runs a strenuous gamut of emotions to play her final scene as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy. (Cukor also employed a third star, Joseph Cotten, as a sympathetic, if unlikely, representative of Scotland Yard.) Mainly, however, the movie gives Bergman full rein. Where the play was confined to a single claustrophobic set, the movie is opened up to include scenes in Italy and the Tower of London. The movie, he wrote, “has pulled such a ticklish assortment of melodramatic camera tricks that the audience was giggling with anxiety.” Among the many tactics used to unnerve Paula was the hiring of an insolent Cockney housemaid (18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first movie role). Reviewing “Gaslight” in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther equated the husband’s mind games with the director’s. There, for reasons that become obvious to the audience long before Paula is able to grasp them, he convinces her that, as she puts it, she does “senseless, meaningless things.” He also proceeds to frighten her out of her wits, in part by dimming the gaslights in the house and blaming it on her imagination. Traumatized by the murder of her aunt, a well-known opera singer, Paula Alquist (Bergman) is inveigled by her new husband, Gregory Anton (Boyer), a fortune seeker, to taking up residence in the abandoned house where the killing occurred. A British adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, released in 1940 as “Gaslight,” cast the Austrian émigré Anton Walbrook as its duplicitous villain the following year Hamilton’s play opened on Broadway with Vincent Price as the smooth-talking husband and ran for 1,295 performances. ![]() “Gaslight,” in which a diabolical husband plans to drive his wife mad through a campaign of false accusations, fabricated memories and bland denials of his previous statements, had two successful iterations before the Cukor film. ![]() The verb “to gaslight,” voted by the American Dialect Society in 2016 as the word most useful/likely to succeed, and defined as “to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity,” derives from MGM’s 1944 movie, directed by George Cukor. Sometimes a title becomes a verb: To “gump,” from “Forrest Gump,” is to insert a fictional character into a historical situation. As a popular art, movies inevitably enrich our lexicon with their titles - “Dirty Harry” is a term for rogue cop and “Star Wars” a moniker for a missile defense system.
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