The prologue begins with Paula Alquist/Ingrid Bergman, as an adolescent, being taken away from a house in London’s Thornton Square in which her opera singer aunt, Alice Alquist has just been murdered. In addition to making explicit the psychoanalytic aspects of the material, the script features an extended prologue that provides a graceful entry into the narrative proper. Rather than dealing with physical violence, the films concentrate on pyschological abuse.īased on Patrick Hamilton’s highly successful play Angel Street, Gaslight has a superb script by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. These brooding films are, to a greater or lesser degree, expressionistic melodramas.
His concentration on heterosexual relations in which the male protagonist is revealed to be either highly neurotic and/or psychotic begins with A Woman’s Face and includes A Double Life and Edward, My Son. Gaslight, a project that wouldn’t seem to appeal to the director given its almost relentless persecution of its heroine, isn’t in fact unique to his career.
My discussion of the film is primarily centred on it stylistics although I will address how it relates to Cukor’s oeuvre. It belongs to a body of work that includes Suspicion, Undercurrent, The Secret Behind the Door and Sleep, My Love. Gaslight is a product of the1940s Hollywood cinema and its fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis, film noir and the Gothic melodrama. The following is an attempt to reclaim Cukor’s film and its many merits. For Hoberman, MGM gave Gaslight pretensions. The implication seems to be that the director is treating the material as a hardy piece of working class British entertainment.
In contrast, he asserts that “…the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more ecomonical (running half an hour shorter), more brutal (opening with the murder of an elderly woman and the killer ransacking her flat), and a lot nastier.” His high regard for Dickinson’s film is based on slight grounds. While acknowledging that Ingrid Bergman is ‘a great actress’, Hoberman goes on to dismiss the Cukor film as a vehicle for her talents. The piece is titled “ Gaslight Hasn’t Lost Its Glow.” Upon reading the piece, the title of the review becomes somewhat curious. Hoberman wrote a short review of a newly released Blu-ray version of Gaslight that features both George Cukor’s 1944 film and Thorwold Dickinson’s 1940 version. In a recent Sunday edition of The New York Times, 1 J.