Gaslight (1944)

Gaslight
Directed by George Cukor
Written by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John H. Balderston from the play “Angel Street” by Patrick Hamilton
1944/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#179 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Gregory Anton: Jewels are wonderful things. They have a life of their own.[/box]

A gorgeously mounted thriller with an Oscar-winning performance by Ingrid Bergman.

A beautiful opera singer is murdered in her London townhouse.  The body is discovered by her devastated young niece Paula.  Paula (Bergman) is sent to Italy to study singing.  Years pass and the murder is not solved.  Paula’s teacher begins to notice that Paula’s heart is not in her music.  That is because it has been given to suave Continental pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer).  They marry soon thereafter.  Paula, the trauma of her aunt’s death having been overcome by love, is persuaded to move with her new husband to her aunt’s house in London.

Gregory wastes no time in isolating Paula from the rest of the world.  He then begins a course of verbal abuse.  This, coupled with mysterious noises coming from overhead and the flickering of the house’s gaslights, begins to convince Paula that she is really going insane.  On one of the couples rare excursions, policeman Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) recognizes Paula from her resemblance to her aunt whom he greatly admired as a boy. Brian opens the closed case file on the aunt’s murder and starts working it.  Meanwhile, things go from bad to worse in the Anton household, Gregory having found an ally in the saucy young housemaid Nancy (Angela Lansbury in her film debut).  With Dame May Whitty as a nosy neighbor.

Ingrid Bergman goes from rosy cheeked enthusiasm to pallid distress during the course of the film, demonstrating a range unexplored in her previous work.  Boyer’s interpretation takes few risks with his suave persona but he does look like someone a woman could plausibly both love and fear.  I preferred Anton Walbrook’s more brutal portrayal of the role in the 1940 British version of the story. Angela Lansbury was fantastic right out of the box, taking every nuance of her rather small part and making her character sleazy, cheeky and totally memorable.  The claustrophobic Victorian sets are a thing of beauty as are Bergman’s costumes.

Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Best Actress for Gaslight, which also won the award for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White.  The film was nominated in the categories of: Best Picture; Best Actor (Boyer); Best Supporting Actress (Lansbury); Best Writing, Screenplay; and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Joseph Ruttenberg).

Trailer (spoilers)