Bergman’s bravura performance aside, the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more economical (running half an hour shorter), more brutal ( opening with the murder of an elderly woman and the killer ransacking her flat), and a lot nastier. Like the movie’s horrible husband, MGM had a reason. The studio tried to destroy all prints that the first “Gaslight” survived at all may be credited to the director Thorold Dickinson’s foresight in making a personal copy.
ANGELA LANSBURY GASLIGHT MOVIE
Girlishly trusting, passionately in love, tragically confused, hysterically terrified and implacably vengeful by turns, she runs a strenuous gamut of emotions to play her final scene as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy.įor its part, MGM undertook to gaslight audiences by pretending that the British movie never existed.
ANGELA LANSBURY GASLIGHT FULL
(Cukor also employed a third star, Joseph Cotten, as a sympathetic, if unlikely, representative of Scotland Yard.) Mainly, however, the movie gives Bergman full rein. Where the play was confined to a single claustrophobic set, the movie is opened up to include scenes in Italy and the Tower of London.
The movie, he wrote, “has pulled such a ticklish assortment of melodramatic camera tricks that the audience was giggling with anxiety.” Among the many tactics used to unnerve Paula was the hiring of an insolent Cockney housemaid (18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first movie role). Reviewing “Gaslight” in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther equated the husband’s mind games with the director’s.
There, for reasons that become obvious to the audience long before Paula is able to grasp them, he convinces her that, as she puts it, she does “senseless, meaningless things.” He also proceeds to frighten her out of her wits, in part by dimming the gaslights in the house and blaming it on her imagination. Traumatized by the murder of her aunt, a well-known opera singer, Paula Alquist (Bergman) is inveigled by her new husband, Gregory Anton (Boyer), a fortune seeker, to taking up residence in the abandoned house where the killing occurred. A British adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, released in 1940 as “Gaslight,” cast the Austrian émigré Anton Walbrook as its duplicitous villain the following year Hamilton’s play opened on Broadway with Vincent Price as the smooth-talking husband and ran for 1,295 performances. “Gaslight,” in which a diabolical husband plans to drive his wife mad through a campaign of false accusations, fabricated memories and bland denials of his previous statements, had two successful iterations before the Cukor film. The verb “to gaslight,” voted by the American Dialect Society in 2016 as the word most useful/likely to succeed, and defined as “to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity,” derives from MGM’s 1944 movie, directed by George Cukor. Sometimes a title becomes a verb: To “gump,” from “Forrest Gump,” is to insert a fictional character into a historical situation. Lansbury’s remarks, meanwhile, signaled an effort to shift the blame right back.As a popular art, movies inevitably enrich our lexicon with their titles - “Dirty Harry” is a term for rogue cop and “Star Wars” a moniker for a missile defense system. The social reckoning initiated by the Weinstein saga-in which claims of sexual misconduct have toppled powerful men from their perches in film, comedy, and media-has shifted responsibility for such abuse away from the victim and-rightfully-onto the perpetrators. Such comments clash harshly with the on-going #MeToo movement that’s led to a more widespread recognition that women’s claims of sexual assault and harassment are legitimate. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–Texas), last month said it’s up to “the female” to ensure she’s not sending the wrong message to would-be harassers. She later backpedaled, saying her remarks were taken out of context, and then blamed her comments on being “absolutely in a state of shock.” “I also think how do we display ourselves? How do we present ourselves as women? What are we asking? Are we asking for it by presenting all the sensuality and all the sexuality?” she said. Lansbury’s remarks echoed a similar statement by fashion designer Donna Karan, who responded to the bombshell sexual misconduct accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in October by citing women’s appearance. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.
0 kommentar(er)
