This Gaslight, the 1940 version, shouldn’t really exist. When MGM decided to remake the British original in 1944 as a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, they tried to destroy the original prints, as if the 1940 film had never existed at all – a case of gaslighting Gaslight?
Bergman and Boyer are good in the remake, and they have alliteration on their side. But so do (Anton) Walbrook and (Diana) Wynyard, in Thorold Dickinson’s excellently creepy original. The plot in a thumbnail. He’s gaslighting her into thinking she’s mentally unstable. Why? So she won’t ask too many questions about what’s going on under her roof. To the point where she even starts believing that the dimming of the gaslight – something that’s objectively measurable – is proof that she’s lost her mind. In fact it’s him upstairs, in a sealed off part of the house, lighting the lamps (which causes the dimming downstairs), to help locate some missing rubies, which he’s already killed for but let slip through his grasp.
Now, back at the scene of the crime, under the name of Paul Mallen, with “fragile” wife Bella, Louis Bauer is determined to find the spoils that eluded him all those years before. But he hasn’t reckoned on an old detective, who investigated the case all those years before. Now retired, Mr Rough reckons there’s something very familiar about “Mr Mallen” and sets out to find out what it is.
Fleshing out this gnarly plot is an excellent cast. Walbrook unnervingly still as the quietly raging Mallen/Bauer and Wynyard excellent as the strung-out Mrs Mallen. Frank Pettingell all bluff common sense as the decent copper. Also very good is Cathleen Cordell as the Mallens’ servant Nancy, who has little time for the poorly Mrs Mallen and treats her with contempt when the master of the house – who she is also flirting with – is not about.
Dickinson’s direction is a textbook study. His prolonged opening sequence starting on a crane swinging over the fashionable square where it all takes place whisks us through the years – the murder, the house lying empty, the Mallens eventually moving in. It is a brilliantly concise bit of show-don’t-tell.
When not flying up in the air, Dickinson is very much down to earth, fascinated by the muck and filth of everyday life. Horse shit on the streets. The faff of a dressing for a Victorian woman, upstairs downstairs life, the music hall where Mr M takes Nancy for a bit of fun before, we expect, teeing her up for a bit more fun of a different sort. Dickinson does it all with such a control of pace. This film glides. Wait for the sequence when Mrs M realises she isn’t mad at all and it’s all her husband’s doing. Thorold goes to town on the crazy angles, a bit of reverse psychology in camera form.
Walbrook’s sneering tone and over-enunciation is just right. It helps that he’s a an Austrian and there’s a war on, of course, but he doesn’t play up to that, it’s just there in the background, a threat in much the same way that Mr M, even at his most solicitous, appears to be threatening his wife.
It’s a detailed portrait of petty and relentless cruelty as a form of control. But also of the way that many, many relationships operate. And if there is a big difference between this and the 1944 remake, it’s that – this is everyday gaslighting, nothing really unusual going on here.
It’s a great film, and there’s even a remastered version by the British Film Institute you can see on YouTube for nix. It’s very good, and no worse or better than the hard copy I watched. I suspect it’s been made from a print rather than the (presumably destroyed) original negative. Not quite as much contrast as you’d like. It is worth it all the same.
Gaslight (1940) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
