Gaslight film ingrid bergman12/30/2023 The acclaimed British actor Angela Lansbury, then only 17 and in her first movie role, plays the maid with whom Gregory openly flirts. He has a thing for precious stones and marvels at the Kohinoor diamond, among others, during a visit to the Tower of London.Īmong the additions is a nosy neighbour (May Whitty), who helps Scotland Yard detective Brian (Joseph Cotten) in solving a 10-year-old case of murder and missing jewellery. Gregory is actually Sergis Bauer who, like Paul in the previous movie, has a mild accent and a Continental air. In Italy, Bergman’s Paula meets and marries Gregory (Boyer), a suave and loving man whose motives are revealed only much later. Among its devices is to maintain an air of suspense about the husband’s real identity. The second film diverges considerably from the play. This Gaslight shone with glossier production values, more fluid camerawork and a cast led by movie star Ingrid Bergman. The 1944 film Gaslight was directed by George Cukor and produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Walbrook’s faintly accented English and Continental looks are contrasted with Bella’s English ways and the kindly former policeman, who suspects that something is not quite right.Ī whiff of foreignness similarly clings to the husband, played by the French-born Charles Boyer, in the Hollywood version. Paul was played by Anton Walbrook, whose foreign origins – he was born Adolf Wohlbruck in Austria – added an extra layer of danger to Bella’s situation. Her husband Paul is openly sinister, and there is little doubt that the hands of the faceless strangler we see in the opening scene belong to him. The movie stays mostly faithful to the play, retaining an air of staginess.īella is already heading towards the edge when we first meet her. The British production Gaslight, directed by Thorold Dickinson, arrived two years after the play was premiered. In the first movie adaptation of Gas Light, items such as a brooch and a painting are used to convince the heroine that she is losing her mind. The house itself is a potential crime scene, with rooms that conceal secrets and objects heaving with unsavoury implications. Marriage ushers in crime and possible death, rather than love and stability. In such productions, the partner – usually the husband – is the least trustworthy. Hamilton’s Gas Light remains a handy tool for films revolving around domestic peril. The gas light that waxes and wanes is an apt metaphor for her situation. When the gas light in her bedroom mysteriously dims every night, she is told by her husband that she is imagining it. She cannot remember where she has put things, is gripped by an unexplained anxiety, and avoids company. Bella has begun to doubt her short-term memory and her very sanity. The heroine of Gas Light is trapped in a web of lies dexterously woven by her spouse. Gaslighting is a state especially familiar to women, who are often told by the men in their lives that they don’t know or mean what they say and are being needlessly anxious or paranoid.īy denying women their intelligence and eroding their confidence and self-belief, some men seek to put them in the same position as the villain in Hamilton’s Gas Light, who works on driving his wife insane in order to steal a set of jewels. The word “gaslighting” is now commonly used to refer to a form of abuse that makes the targets party to their own destruction. Patrick Hamilton’s Gas Light gave the English vocabulary a ready shorthand term to describe psychological damage caused by sustained emotional manipulation and deception. The bestseller revolved around a concept introduced in a play in 1938 that was made widely known by movie adaptations in 19. The recent Netflix release The Girl on the Train is an official adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s novel of the same name.
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