George Cukor (1944)
George Cukor’s version of the Patrick Hamilton stage play – with a screenplay by John van Druten (with John L Balderston and Walter Reisch) – is highly effective. We’re in no doubt from an early stage that Gregory Anton is the villain; and that the immediate threat he poses is to his wife Paula’s mental health – he makes her think she’s going mad – rather than her physical survival (although the point comes when we fear for that too). This makes Gaslight a genuinely psychological suspense story; and the visualisation of the Antons’ London house (the cinematographer was Joseph Ruttenberg) puts the film firmly in Victorian noir territory. Cukor’s storytelling is very assured but his concentration on the characters – and the performances – gives the plot much more emotional substance than it might otherwise have had. He draws out the insidious potential and the realistic substrate of Hamilton’s melodrama: the ability of one half of a relationship to exert authority, then abuse their power, over the other half – to destructive effect.
Ingrid Bergman is marvellous as Paula: looking breathtakingly young in the first glimpse of her, she convinces you in the early scenes of her courtship with Gregory that she’s physically attracted to him in a way that blinds her to what we in the audience can spot and beware. Bergman handles superbly the transitions between the young wife’s repeated losses of self-possession and her efforts to regain a semblance of normal life; her breakdown at a musical soirée, when Gregory makes her think she’s stolen his watch, is perhaps the highlight of highlights. Charles Boyer, as Gregory, understands – and achieves – the frightening power of not raising your voice; his tone is so suavely authoritative and the violence inside him, for much of the time, so smoothly suppressed that you can believe that Paula keeps on believing him – and capitulates to his quietly relentless campaign of belittling and disorienting her. Angela Lansbury, as the housemaid Nancy, has a wonderful, crafty sullenness; when she comes on to Gregory (these two really like the look of each other), she moves closer to him then holds back. Cukor and Lansbury judge these distances perfectly.
Joseph Cotten is the police inspector who discovers what’s going on in the house; he’s also – a rather clumsy element of the plotting – a fan from childhood of Paula’s murdered, opera-singer aunt – and so brings personal backstory as well as professional skills to bear on the case. I don’t mean to be condescending in saying that Cotten is a breath of fresh New World air but his relaxed charm and intelligence are a reassuring contrast to the tensions and sensuality of the various Europeans in the major parts. Dame May Whitty is in a fairly clichéd role as a nosy neighbour but there’s a palpable avidity in her curiosity, which is very likeable. An actress I don’t remember having seen before, Heather Thatcher, has a nice cut-glass social professionalism as the hostess of the soirée. I had no problem with the transatlantic cockney accents of Tom Stevenson (as a policeman who is Nancy’s latest beau) and one or two others in minor parts, because they’re all vividly in character in other respects. Barbara Everest is the helpfully deaf housekeeper. All give added zest to what is a richly entertaining film.
15 January 2009
