One of the darkest legends from the so-called golden years of Hollywood is the story of how MGM bought the rights to the successful British film Gaslight (1940), destroyed all the prints, and then created their own remake in 1944 by copying the original shot for shot. Like most legends it is not entirely true. The first Gaslight was bought and suppressed by MGM, but it was not plagiarised by the writers and director of the later film. The 1944 version does not seem like the MGM studio fare of the period, where the look of the films was dominated…