GASLIGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 319, 3 August 1945, Page 18

GASLIGHT

| (M-G-M)

S a matter of strict principle, it might be no more than justice if this department were to refuse to notice the

existence of this picture. For Hollywood’s Gaslight was responsible for the untimely disappearance, almost without trace, of the British version starring

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook (for a full account of the crime see Listener’ of April 27). But Hollywood’s Gaslight would not be an easy film to ignore even if one wanted to (and anyway I am not certain that the film itself should be held accountable for the sins of the whole system under which the destruction of the British version was possible). So let us say that we accept the M-G-M offering under protest, and leave it at that. What you may find less easy to accept, if you ate wedded to the traditions of the stage, are some of the deyiations from Patrick Hamilton’s original play. The Victorian villain who deliberately sets out to drive his wife insane has been turned into a foreigner, and so has the wife herself-because these roles are played by Charlés Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, and Mr. Boyer in particular has an accent which nobody could accept as London-grown. Miss Bergman herself is now the niece of a great foreign opera-singer and was actually in that horrid house in Thornton Square, as a little girl, when some unknown scoundrel crept in and strangled her aunt. Years later Miss Bergman has married such a dashing fellow in Italy, a composer, and has brought him back to the house in Thornton Square-and then things begin to happen; the gaslight burns dimmer night after night, while footsteps sound in the untenanted rooms above; and the agreeable husband is gradually revealed as a ruthless fiend who is corroding his wife’s brain by insinuations, humiliations, and systematic mental torment of the subtlest kind. Thus far the deviations frém the original are mostly superficial, and permissible in the circumstances; it is not until the detective comes on the scene in order to unmask the husband as the man who, having murdered the opera-singer years befofe, has returned to the house to look for her jewels-it is not until then that you really notice the hand, or perhaps I should say the great paw, of-Hollywood. For whereas the detective in the play was a shrewd but fatherly old fellow with few pretentions to culture, in the film he is a handsome young gallant, a product of the new Scotland Yard rather than of the old, who is on the friendliest terms with Lady So-and-so, ahd who, seeing the distraught wife, is immediately touched by the sight of 80 mutch beauty in such obvious distress. How M-G-M miist have blessed the plays wright for his forethought in including the character of the detective! Re-model him as I have described, make him be in love with the wife, give the role to Joseph Cotten, and you have everything that Hollywood imagines is essential for a popular sticcess-romantic appeal and an implied happy ending. It only remains to add that few stage plays in recent history have been morte successful than the original Gaslight. For of course what Gaslight depends on for its attraction is not gallantry and a dawn-breaking finale, but sheer psychological horror; and the film has that too, ahd would have it whether Joseph Cotten were there or not, whether (continued on next page) —

(continued from previous page) the detective was 36 years old or 60. The film, being a film, roams much farther afield than the play did; it wanders all round Thornton Square and even goes to Italy, and in: the process the suspense, which in the play was concentrated into a single setting, inevitably tends to be dissipated, Dramatic unity is lessened. But there is still plenty to make Gaslight a far-better-than-aver-. age chiller, thanks mainly to the ideas which the playwright originally put into it, then to the disciplined finely-gradu-ated performances of Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and finally to the richly emotional style of George Cukor’s direction which invests the lush Victorian atmosphere with subtle terror.