Saturday Night Cinema: Gaslight (1944)

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema feature, Gaslight, is a classic that you may think you  know well, but you’d be wrong. Gaslight, you might say, “I know it quite well!” Ah yes, with Bergman and Boyer, but this adaptation of the stage play preceded the better-known version.

Charles Boyer and Anton Walbrook are very different. Walbrook holds the dark mood better, and frankly, he is more terrifying than the George Cukor remake. Anton Walbrook unnerves me perhaps because I saw him in the The Red Shoes at an early age, and that movie still haunts me.

The 1940 Thorold Dickinson film is “an impeccable screen treatment of Patrick Hamilton’s classic stage thriller set in late Victorian London, where dangerously handsome psychopathic killer Anton Walbrook (later to star in Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades) is driving his wife (Diana Wynyard) insane to get his hands on a cache of rubies.”

“Gaslight,” Thorold Dickinson, Guardian 1940:

Although he only directed eight features, Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) had as remarkable and wide-ranging a career in the British cinema as his close contemporaries David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Like Lean, he served a long apprenticeship as an editor. Like Asquith, a fellow liberal, Oxford-educated son of the establishment, he had an early interest in the avant-garde and played a significant role in organising ACT, the film industry trade union.

As film critic of the Spectator, Graham Greene praised The High Command and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Dickinson’s first two films, both thrillers. But there were long absences from commercial cinema. In the late 1930s he spent several years making leftwing documentaries supporting the Spanish government. Much of his second world war was devoted to public information pictures, and for several postwar years he produced pictures for the United Nations. In the 1960s he became Britain’s first full-time movie academic at University College London, and in 1971 published A Discovery of Cinema.
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Gaslight, his third feature, is an impeccable screen treatment of Patrick Hamilton’s classic stage thriller set in late Victorian London, where dangerously handsome psychopathic killer Anton Walbrook (later to star in Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades) is driving his wife (Diana Wynyard) insane to get his hands on a cache of rubies. Only the interest that a former police detective (Frank Pettingell) takes in the case can save her from incarceration in an asylum or worse. This skilfully edited work was overshadowed in the 1940s by George Cukor’s accomplished Hollywood remake, released here as Murder in Thornton Square. The BFI’s handsomely restored DVD and Blu-ray versions are accompanied by five Dickinson documentaries and an informative booklet. The term “gaslighting” – meaning the strategy by which charming manipulators persuade their victims to doubt themselves and their sanity – has entered the language of American psychology.

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