Gaslight (1940 film)

Gaslight
Pre-release poster for trade showing
Directed by	Thorold Dickinson
Produced by	John Corfield
Written by	A. R. Rawlinson Bridget Boland
Based on	Gas Light 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton
Starring	Anton Walbrook Diana Wynyard
Music by	Richard Addinsell
Cinematography	Bernard Knowles
Edited by	Sidney Cole
Production company	British National Films
Distributed by	Anglo-American Film Corp. (UK)
Release dates	25 June 1940 (1940-06-25) (UK)
Running time	89 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Gaslight is a 1940 British film directed by Thorold Dickinson which stars Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and features Frank Pettingell. The film adheres more closely to the original play upon which it is based – Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light (1938) – than the better-known 1944 MGM adaptation. The play had been shown on Broadway as Angel Street, so when the film was released in the United States it was given the same name.

Plot

Alice Barlow (Marie Wright) is murdered by an unknown man, who then ransacks her house, looking for her valuable and famous rubies. The house remains empty for years, until newlyweds Paul and Bella Mallen move in. Bella (Diana Wynyard) soon finds herself misplacing small objects; and, before long, Paul (Anton Walbrook) has her believing she is losing her sanity. B. G. Rough (Frank Pettingell), a former detective involved in the original murder investigation, immediately suspects him of Alice Barlow's murder.

Paul uses the gas lamps to search the closed off upper floors, which causes the rest of the lamps in the house to dim slightly. When Bella comments on the lights' dimming, he tells her she is imagining things. Bella is persuaded she is hearing noises, unaware that Paul enters the upper floors from the house next door. The sinister interpretation of the change in light levels is part of a larger pattern of deception to which Bella is subjected. It is revealed Paul is a bigamist. He is the wanted Louis Bauer, who has returned to the house to search for the rubies he was unable to find after the murder.

Cast

• Anton Walbrook as Paul Mallen
• Diana Wynyard as Bella Mallen
• Frank Pettingell as B.G. Rough
• Cathleen Cordell as Nancy the parlour maid           
• Robert Newton as Vincent Ullswater
• Minnie Rayner as Elizabeth, the cook

• Jimmy Hanley as Cobb
• Marie Wright as Alice Barlow
• Aubrey Dexter as House agent
• Mary Hinton as Lady Winterbourne
• Angus Morrison as Pianist
• Katie Johnson as Alice Barlow's maid

Reception

Encouraged by the success of the play and film, MGM bought the remake rights, but with a clause insisting that all existing prints of Dickinson's version be destroyed, even to the point of trying to destroy the negative, so that it would not compete with their more highly publicized 1944 film starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten.

Time Out wrote, "Nothing like as lavish as the later MGM version ... But in its own small-scale way a superior film by far. Lurking menace hangs in the air like a fog, the atmosphere is electric, and Wynyard suffers exquisitely as she struggles to keep dementia at bay. It's hardly surprising that MGM tried to destroy the negative of this version when they made their own five years later."

Gaslight as expression

The psychological term gaslighting, which describes a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is gradually manipulated into doubting his or her own reality, originated from the play and its two film adaptations.

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Vermilye, Jerry. The Great British Films Citadel Press, 1978. pp. 52–54. ISBN 0-8065-0661-X

External links

• Gaslight at IMDb
• Gaslight at the TCM Movie Database
• Gaslight at Rotten Tomatoes