Saturday Night Cinema: Gaslight (1944)

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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. gaslight anton

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.”

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“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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EJO
EJO
7 years ago

Iranian Cleric: ‘Improperly’ Dressed Iranian Women Cause Climate Change

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/06/17/iranian-cleric-improperly-dressed-iranian-women-cause-climate-change/
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This is probably one of the reasons Miss Geller in not allowed to travel to Great Britain.

EJO
EJO
7 years ago

Attention all of you Daddy Shruggers out there in Atlasland.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!!

Please accept my sincere wishes for an absolutely wonderful day tomorrow.

That day that has been set aside especially for you.

May you receive lots, and lots of love; hugs; kisses; smiles; pats on the back; and well wishes from the ones you love.

And maybe some neat presents too.

Patrick
Patrick
7 years ago

Pamela picked another great film. Love the old English movies, and what a good ending!

GeneP54
GeneP54
7 years ago

I’m anxious to watch this since I love the 1944 version. One thing that makes that film so memorable is that it was Dame Angela Lansbury’s film debut at the tender age of 17, after fleeing from London to escape the Blitz in 1940. (she had to have a social worker stay with her because of her age). I just love her!
I hope this one is as good, if not better. Thanks for the pick!

Gordon Miller
Gordon Miller
7 years ago

In my day, I remember people using the expression,” What are you trying to do, gaslight me?’

Wolfgang Stahl
Wolfgang Stahl
7 years ago

Beautiful ! But me as an German, I would like to add a “cinema” a little bit different…I have understand those artikels here are an attraction or a time to “rest” and see the beautifull things in life…So I will do too: German shepherds, the best of their kind…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kWupMxAmDA

Wolfgang Stahl
Wolfgang Stahl
7 years ago

This is one of your great American boys, who spend his last summer with his (our GERMAN) German shepherd a beautiful day on the beach, before he left to serve America as an United States Marine and deployed over see`s… Greetings from Germany WOLFGANG 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VScavfWBkQ

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s;vbkr0boc,klos;
7 years ago

Hollywood spent a fortune taking this fine film out of circulation in order to make a hit of the Ingrid Bergman version.

Wolfgang Stahl
Wolfgang Stahl
7 years ago

My beloved Polish wife asks me to post this here…He is a Polak she said… 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-TtVX4Zce0

Wolfgang Stahl
Wolfgang Stahl
7 years ago
Reply to  Wolfgang Stahl

And she says, that you Americans like the Polish…

michaelwarden
michaelwarden
7 years ago

Wonderful. Thank you, Pamela.

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Thanks for sharing!