Gaslight at 80, or his and hers realities
George Cukor's 1944 film Gaslight is a bridge between the classic and the modern
Film Features Gaslight
1944 signaled a high-water mark for film noir with the release of Double Indemnity. The film codified elements that we now think of as genre tropes: the detective delivering backstory via voiceover, the shadows of Venetian blinds on the wall. But, really, Double Indemnity is Barbara Stanwyck’s film; her Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale to end all femme fatales, seduces a detective and gets him to help her bump off her husband. If there was ever a role Stanwyck was going to win a competitive Oscar for, it was this one. Unfortunately for her, she had to compete against Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
Whether George Cukor’s Gaslight is a noir is up for debate…literally. In 2017, Turner Classic Movies encouraged people to debate this exact topic. Bergman’s Paula is anything but a femme fatale. She is psychologically abused for most of the film’s runtime by Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), the man she married after just a couple weeks of dating, and the man who is after her family money. It certainly has all the elements of scheming and conspiring and slime that we’d come to expect from a noir, but Gaslight feels rooted in older-school melodrama.
Gaslight is famously where the term “gaslighting” comes from, even though the actual gaslight part of it is a more minor example; throughout the film’s runtime, Gregory hides things and tells Paula she lost or stole them to make her question her own sanity. He is plainly villainous and terrifying. He hires Nancy (Angela Lansbury in her film debut) as a maid and instructs her not to talk to Paula. He convinces Paula that she’s too unwell to leave the house, and when she threatens to go to an important social event without him, he immediately changes his mind about going and delivers wicked double entendres like, “You didn’t really think I’d let you go alone, did you?” Maybe he thinks this sounds chivalrous, but we know it sounds like a threat. Gregory creeps around the attic, looking for Paula’s aunt’s jewels, but tells her she’s imagining the noise.
Gaslight is full of couples and doubles in a way that feels positively Victorian (even if it takes place during the Edwardian era). The house Paula and Gregory live in once belonged to Paula’s late aunt Alice; both women sing professionally and bear a striking resemblance to each other. Paula and Gregory’s shadows are like characters of their own, too; in one of the film’s most stunning scenes, Cukor’s camera sees its main couple into a bedroom, but it’s Gregory’s shadow that tells Paula’s shadow that she can’t leave the house. From this, two realities emerge: There’s the real world that Paula starts in, where she is a perfectly sane society lady, and the one that Gregory constructs, where he can bend life to his whims and prohibit his wife from leaving her home.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLZbXA4lyCtqoHQdlqBn71qhTM6wXjnJGi’ type=’playlist’]Paula becomes both the lady of the house and the madwoman in the attic, to borrow a phrase usually applied to Victorian novel Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, which, as it so happens, was also turned into a 1944 film, Jane’s stay at Mr. Rochester’s home quickly sees strange things happening. As his governess, she hears noises and voices in the attic, to say nothing of the fire that mysteriously starts in the middle of the night. Later, as she’s set to marry Rochester, there is a scandal at the altar: He is already married. His wife Bertha fell victim to congenital madness, you see, so he kept her locked and hidden in his attic. It was the only thing he could think to do. Jane runs away in the middle of the night, but returns later in the novel. Bertha has since burned the entire house down and died, and Rochester is disabled in the process. Jane agrees to marry him, and they look together toward the future—one that presumably doesn’t end with Jane in the attic.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that won’t happen, just as there was never a guarantee that the man Paula quickly married wouldn’t try to drive her to madness. While Gaslight isn’t a straight adaptation, this influence, and the Jane-Bertha dichotomy, plays out in the single character of Paula. She must hold both realities and both experiences because the man she was supposed to be able to trust has thrust them upon her.
Paula tries to trust Gregory, even as he makes it clear repeatedly that he doesn’t trust her. In one scene, a painting goes missing from the wall; Paula swears she didn’t move it, but Gregory won’t take her word for it. (A likely thing for him to do, since he moved it.) When he asks both of the housemaids if they touched it and they say no, he takes their word for it. Paula meanwhile swears on a Bible that she didn’t touch the painting, but it’s not enough. She’s on her way to the attic, and she sees herself being replaced with Nancy, a newer model.
Nancy and Paula have the same haircut, so you know where this is going. Nancy is younger, and Gregory flirts with her right in front of Paula almost as soon as we meet her (and denies doing so—this feels the most contemporary of all the examples in Gaslight of how “gaslight” is used today). We hear a lot about Nancy from other people; she likes to go on dates, and is decried by another character as “scandalous.” But she is also in control of her life in a way that Paula is not. She makes her own money and gets to go out some nights, with or without a male companion. Within the relatively theatrical acting in Gaslight, Lansbury’s performance is the most naturalistic, which also gives the character a feel of modernity. If Gaslight is a noir, it’s Nancy, not Paula, who’s the femme fatale—sexy, conspiring, dangerous.
Maybe there’s a reality where Paula could live on her own terms like Nancy—or like Jane—if she wasn’t fenced in by her family name and her station. Paula isn’t allowed to act out, to be “crazy,” because the expectations for how the high-class woman needs to conduct herself are too specific. Her episode at the piano reception—the one time where she could have gotten help outside of the house—is brushed off. Gaslight is hardly sympathetic to Nancy, but it’s worth mentioning that in 1944, the image of a working woman held all the patriotic connotations of the war effort. Even though Gaslight was set in the past when it premiered (in the years following 1875, specifically), it depicts its protagonist as a woman already falling behind.
In the end, Paula does take control of her destiny, confronting her husband alone while he’s tied to a chair. She taunts him and gleefully plays the role of the madwoman before letting the police have him. Paula looks toward the future, finally, with Inspector Cameron (Joseph Cotten). He, presumably, won’t gaslight her. In the coming years—even in the coming months with Double Indemnity—it will be the detective who gets corrupted by the women. But the idea of the “crazy” woman, in actuality put in this constructed role by a man, is one we would spend the next 80 years unpacking.
24 Comments
Gaslight is actually 84, because the play first got a British adaptation that was buried by MGM when they bought back the rights. They denied it even existed and they tried to destroy all copies. That’s right, they gaslit it out of existence.
The major difference is that the 1940 film is completely upfront that the husband is a nasty guy who’s up to no good, even if the full scope of his scheme comes as a surprise, while the 1944 one tries to make it a twist, which unfortunately can’t work at all now because everyone knows what “gaslighting” is.
I would imagine even then it would have been hard to pull off as a twist, since most viewers would go into it knowing he was a villain. This article made me view the 1940 version again, and his villainy is really somewhat delicious. He’s SO VILLAINOUS!! Preening in front of the mirror, almost literally twirling his moustache. And the maid is also just so so bad and common and nasty and ordinary in her nastiness. She delights in pulling one over on the mistress – she has fun being a villain. As great as Angela Lansbury is, she’s almost too sinister in a big Mrs Danvers way. Comparing the two versions reminds me of “Nightmare Alley” – the remake had all that gloss and all those layers, but the original just went for it, bam. The remake was admirable, but it reminds me of that old quote I heard in college, “The altar of god needeth not man’s adornment”.
I think the way to play it now would be effectively to gaslight the audience. Play the husband as seeming very genuine and loving. Make us understand how women fall prey to gaslighting behavior, which often involves a lot of seeming love and concern on the part of the gaslighter. Make the audience question, “Is he actually the bad guy?” even though they totally know he is.
Honestly, the fate and history of the 1940 Gaslight is one of my favorite things ever. MGM trying to make the original film just…disappear, literally disappear forever, in favor of their own version. It’s just so delicious! “Don’t be ridiculous, Gaslight is a 1944 film with Ingrid Bergman!! You must be imagining things again.”
I didn’t know the first case of being gaslit, was for Gaslight. That’s so perfect I cannot even…
I know, it’s so wonderful it makes me want to squeeeeee! For years I had vaguely remembered “Gaslight” as starring Joan Fontaine*, because I somehow saw the original (on public TV I think, in Chicago) just the once when I was very young, so when people would refer to Ingrid Bergman…I wondered. I knew I’d seen someone else, and it definitely wasn’t Ingrid Bergman! But noone and nothing EVER referred to the original film, it was as if it didn’t exist. I literally wondered if it was possible I’d imagined it. *I know now it wasn’t Joan Fontaine in the original, but I must have plugged her into the role in my memory at one time because she was very Joan Fontaine-ish, and it was a very Joan Fontaine role.
The same thing happened to the 1940 Swiss Family Robinson film when the Disney one came out, especially notable because it had the first acting role of Orson Welles, a year before Citizen Kane. And now it’s on Disney+, so who won that fight?
One thing you’ll notice if you watch enough movies this old is that studios and/or filmmakers were very antsy about the audience’s willingness to sit through a straight drama for feature length, so they’d often add side characters whose sole purpose is to occasionally pop up for jokes. These usually come off as extremely annoying to modern audiences, but Gaslight has one of the best, with the appealingly twisted idea of an outwardly sweet old lady who just happens to be obsessed with violent crime and is delighted to live so close to a house where a murder happened, constantly probing Paula for details without a hint of tact. And of course, she now bears an uncanny resemblance to a typical true crime podcast fan.
I don’t know why you’re saying this is a good film, it’s obviously bad and everyone else knows it, you just think it’s good because you’re crazy
Are you going to insist the parrot is just resting, too?
2+2=5
It’s just pining for Fjords! Very lovely plumage, isn’t it?
>>Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale to end all femme fatales, seduces a detective and gets him to help her bump off her husband<
Came here to say this. If you’ve seen Double Indemnity this is an impossible mistake to make and if you haven’t seen Double Indemnity why the fuck have you not seen Double Indemnity?
And if you haven’t seen Double Indemnity, why the fuck are you using it as an example of the ur-Noir film style?
..so this movie isn’t about lighting farts on fire?
It is and you just think it isn’t.
It never ceases to blow my mind that this was Angela Lansburys first performance, and she’s 18. She genuinely never looked her age until the 1970s. What a legend, still can’t believe she’s gone.
If it feels modern, it’s because nothing’s as timeless as domestic abuse. Charles Boyer would fit right in as a case study in Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do or in any county courthouse DV order hearing. I wouldn’t knock the melodrama as dated or a poor choice either. Bergman nails the true-to-life self-doubt, revulsion, and almost Hitchcockian horror of discovering both that Boyer is a creep and that she can’t trust herself to judge anyone’s character.Melodrama is highly underrated overall. We live in times of huge emotions. We deserve the catharsis of watching great actors exorcise the bodily emotional reactions we can’t or won’t let ourselves indulge in and watching great directors construct images that call up our thoughts that are too subtle, complex, or grand for dialogue. Thank goodness for Denis Villeneuve honestly, Dune is smuggling us the melodrama we crave in the sexy bacon of a franchise.
I’m not super well versed in films of that period, but I feel like Boyer’s more naturalistic performance (rather than a stagey dramatic one) is also what makes it still work today. His manipulation is done so skillfully, it’s infuriating, and yeah, very similar to the dv stories I’ve heard. It was painfully believable to see how his abuse builds while Bergman deteriorates, but makes it so much more satisfying when he finally gets his comeuppance.
I got a gaslight tutorial notification for this?
In a lot of ways the movie shouldn’t work. It’s really more of a Hitchcock, Siodmak or even Brahm picture but MGM went with a “women’s director” ostensibly just to cater to Bergman’s needs. Cukor was great at romantic comedy (perhaps better than anyone else and by all means check out his work with Judy Holiday) but his hand was always heavier with drama and he seems to let Bergman overindulge some of her hammiest tendencies here although she does rise to the occasion at the climax. While Boyer is just sooo perfect Cotten couldn’t pass for being English if his life depended on it and it’s only his irresistible screen presence (even in the worst of movies) that redeems him here. More than anything its the typically lush Metro production that carries the movie and it is gorgeous to look at although I can’t help but wonder if the movie wouldn’t have been better served if it had been produced by Fox which had filmed both the tighter and more appropriately atmospheric “The Lodger” and “Hangover Square” around the same time.If nothing else the film did create THE catchphrase for psychological manipulation particularly in regard to men controlling women and there is something to be said for that. All things considered it still is a fun watch. Check it out if you get the chance. If nothing else take a look at how hot and saucy Angela Landsbury was at the time (and even more so in “The Picture of Dorian Grey” released a year later where she gets to really slut it up).I see there’s a lot of discussion here about the original British production. It was actually included on the the DVD release as a bonus feature and bragging rights aside there isn’t much to recommend about it.
Article never explains the title!Gaslight is famously where the term “gaslighting” comes from, even though the actual gaslight part of it is a more minor example; throughout the film’s runtime
The husband goes into the attic to turn the gas fueled lights in the house (“gaslight”) up and down to make the wife think she is seeing things