![]() ![]() ![]() Bergman owned the monopoly on playing tortured women for decades, and this role earned her first Best Actress Oscar. ![]() The performances by the leads are also incomparable, as Diana Wynyard is no Ingrid Bergman, at least in this case. Gaslight.ĭickinson’s movie also sticks closer to the play, with a former detective (Frank Pettingell) being the one to crack the case because he needed a way to keep busy, instead of a dashing Scotland Yard detective (Joseph Cotten), as in the Cukor. Bernard Knowles, the cinematographer on Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Sabotage and Secret Agent, also shot the U.K. The 1940 Gaslight might actually be the real best-Hitchcock-movie-not-directed-by-Hitchock and it’s easy to see why. Where Cukor appears to have an unlimited budget, Dickinson uses the camera as an amazing tool to bring emotions out and focus on specific things in the frame. film was directed by Thorold Dickinson, who makes the best of the production’s obvious constraints. It plays to the actors’ strengths, thanks in part to the fascinating direction of George Cukor, who manages to balance MGM’s need for glamour with the story’s darkest corners. It opens the play up, delving a little deeper into the early romance between Gregory (Boyer) and Paula (Bergman). film is a low-budget chamber drama that rarely leaves the house, the MGM movie is a glamorous Hollywood production with no expenses spared. film came out, the two films can sit comfortably next to each other as two wildly different adaptations of the same play. But 75 years after the MGM film’s release and 80 years after the U.K. MGM must have been paranoid because, unlike a foreign-language original film that would only be played in the big cities, an English-language original would be stronger competition. (Inexplicably, this was also the title used for the play on Broadway). When MGM bought the remake rights, they reportedly tried to destroy all copies of the 1940 film, which was released to critical acclaim in the U.S. They tried to bury the British version, made just four years earlier and featuring a devastating performance by Anton Walbrook that puts Boyer’s to shame. In MGM’s pursuit of making their own film adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 hit play Gas Light, the studio unknowingly played a little gaslighting themselves. ![]()
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