Gaslight
The term “gaslighting” took hold in modern popular consciousness after the election of Donald Trump, but it came from the play by Patrick Hamilton in 1938, which George Cukor is adapting to exceptional degree here. This feels like a gothic romance in the vein of Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” but as the screws tighten for Ingrid Bergman’s Paula Alquist, we’re left wondering how she is going to hold on to her sanity every moment her husband speaks, and how she will be set free. That is accomplished by a concerned cop simply listening to her, hoping to put the pieces together.
Charles Boyer’s Gregory Anton is one of the most insidious characters in movie history, a man whose every action is intended to control Paula, the woman he has claimed he loves. Paula has been in Italy, learning to sing like her aunt, Alice, who’s been brutally murdered. It’s there where she meets Gregory, who is her accompanist. They fall in love, and marry, but when they get home- living in her aunt’s old home- things change. Paula’s grip on reality starts to grow tenuous, as Gregory publicly puts on a loving face, but privately chides her for “forgetting” where things go, and makes her unsure of what’s true in her life.
Cukor’s direction in this film is to create a closed-room psychological thriller; the longer Paula and Gregory are together, the more isolated she is from society. Onlookers are curious to see the inside, but Gregory keeps visitors at a minimum, with only the maids (Barbara Everest and Angela Lansbury) allowed in. On one of their rare trips out together, a man with his niece and nephew (Joseph Cotton’s Brian Cameron) sees Paula, and we get the sense he’s seeing a ghost. Cameron is a police officer who met Alice, and was quite fond of her. As the film progresses, he begins to put pieces together as to what might be happening, so that, when he finally confronts Paula, it’s impact is buoyed by both her anxiety in seeing someone else, but his compassion as he tries to convince her of the truth she knows deep down. Bergman’s performance is absolutely riveting, watching this woman who’s so brilliant at conveying emotional strength, breakdown and have to find the strength to not only stand up to her husband- who’s had nefarious intent from the get go- but to trust Cotton’s character, who has to find a way to get her to trust a stranger more than her husband. The climax of this film is a riveting piece of filmmaking and screen acting, illustrating a faith in humanity that is hard to discover when the one you trust most has done nothing but lie to you about something that is happening before your very eyes.
