Cinema
Gaslight
Thorold Dickinson · 1940
Synopsis
London, 1865, at night. A man strangles an old lady, Alice Barlow, in her house in Pimlico Square, then ransacks the rooms without finding the rubies he is looking for. The house stands empty for twenty years. A young couple, Paul and Bella Mallen, eventually move in. Bella mislays objects, the gas jets dim in the evening for no reason, and her husband tells her she is imagining things. A former policeman, who had followed the case years before, begins to take an interest in the house.
Context
The play by Patrick Hamilton from which the film is taken had been first staged in December 1938 near London. A British production company acquired the rights and entrusted the direction to a man appointed three weeks before shooting; the film was released in 1940, and in the United States, under another title, more than a decade later. When an American company bought the rights to make its own version, it obtained a clause requiring the destruction of existing copies, tried to have the negative destroyed, and renamed its remake in Great Britain. The director and his editor, Sidney Cole, secretly kept a copy, later entrusted to the British Film Institute.
Who it is for
Eighty-four minutes in the restored version, eighty-nine on release; in English, with no known French version.
Prizes and reception
A film that the buyer of its rights tried to make disappear, based on a story that gave its name, in English, to the manipulation it describes.
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