The Two Films of Gaslight

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 by the taste of the head of design, Cedric Gibbons. Whatever the period or the genre, he insisted on the sets being drowned in white. However, ever since making The Women with its gleaming white walls, and white and off-white furniture in virtually every scene, director George Cukor had in his quiet way been fighting against the studio style. Design, he insisted, should reflect the subject of the film, and Gaslight with its film noir visuals and darkly oppressive settings proved to be one of Cukor’s most famous victories.

Still, what MGM did to the British artists was pretty brutal. The director, Thorold Dickinson, was forbidden to show the 1940 Gaslight to producers—his best calling card at that stage of his career—and the film was saved only because he and the editor, Sidney Cole, kept one of the prints. Years later, when MGM’s rights had expired and the British Gaslight was shown at the National Film Theatre in the season of Dickinson’s films celebrating his eightieth birthday, the film began to receive the recognition it deserved. Earlier this year a blu-ray transfer was released. So with the Cukor version also readily available, we can now compare these two remarkable films.

Both works are based on Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light. First presented at the Richmond Theatre in London, opening on December 5, 1938, it was an immediate success. In quick succession there was a tour, a radio production—the first of many—and even a television version for the then minuscule British television audience. By 1941, renamed Angel Street, it was running on Broadway, where it stayed for two years. Reading the play in the Samuel French acting edition, it is easy to see why it was so popular. According to the original stage directions, “the curtain rises upon the rather terrifying darkness of the late afternoon—the zero hour as it were between the feeble dawn of gaslight and tea”.

In this setting the suave, good-looking Mr Manningham questions his wan, haggard, sub­servient wife about a missing picture that he accuses her of having hidden before. After threatening his wife with the madhouse if she cannot find a missing bill, Manningham leaves for the evening. Then the cook announces a visitor. He is ex-detective Rough, “over sixty—greying, short, wiry, active, brusque, friendly, overbearing”. Rough has been hunting the man who killed the previous owner of the house. The murderer is Mr Manningham. Rough assures Mrs Manningham that far from being mad she is being systematically driven out of her mind. After seeming to leave “for the club” because he cannot endure his wife’s insanity, Manningham returns to search the boarded-up top storeys of the house for the jewels he had failed to find on the night of the murder. The play never leaves the cluttered living room but Hamilton brilliantly deploys a range of devices (including the famous rising and falling of the gas lights) to build the tension that culminates in a final tautly written confrontation between husband and wife.

I have never seen Gas Light on the stage, but as a boy it scared the living daylights out of me on radio where these effects were only described; so it is easy to imagine the impact the play must have had in 1939, especially with Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Mrs Manningham. She was one of the great stage actresses of the era, famous for the Juliet and Lady Macbeth she had played opposite John Gielgud. In Britain and the USA (where Vincent Price played Manningham) contemporary reviews vividly describe how the performers worked their magic, drawing audiences into the claustrophobic world of the play.

The 1940 film version scripted by A.R. Rawlinson and Bridget Boland sacrifices this concentration on a single room to create a more fluid cine­matic structure. Here one of the main influences was Marcel Carné’s Hotel du Nord (1938), which had been shown in London in 1939 along with the same director’s Quai des Brumes (1938). Thorold Dickinson was a great admirer.

Hotel du Nord was set in and around the hotel of the same name in the St Martin district of Paris. As with so many of the poetic realist films of the period the hotel and even the canal it overlooked were recreated in the studio by the great designer Alexandre Trauner. Even though the detail of working-class life was meticulously recreated, the visuals are all elegantly composed—the poetry in the poetic realism, I suppose. In the opening the camera cranes over the exterior of the Hotel du Nord, discovering two of the main characters as they make their way to a bench beside the canal. The next scene takes us inside the hotel to a confirmation celebration in which the camera unobtrusively covers the action in a series of mid-shots and tight panning movements. In Gaslight, Dickinson’s camera explores Pimlico Square, stopping at number twelve, then cuts to an interior. Hands come from behind an elderly lady and strangle her. There follows a montage showing the same hands searching drawers and cutting open upholstery, and feet going up stairs. Then we see a distraught maidservant standing at the doorway calling for help.

Certainly this was influenced by the Carné film, but Dickinson was a montage director who believed the foundation of film art was in the editing. Real cinema, he wrote, “builds the story with the camera, taking the camera to the action instead of arranging the action before the camera”. Although coming late to the project when Anthony Asquith was unavailable, Dickinson seems to have collaborated well with cinematographer Bernard Knowles, who had photographed Hitchcock’s Secret Agent and Thirty-Nine Steps, and editor, Sidney Cole. Camera movements don’t just capture the intense acting by Anton Walbrook as the malevolent husband and Diana Wynyard as his wife, but also create the tension. Walbrook, called Mallen to account for his Austrian accent, gives a bravura performance of sadistic malevolence while Diana Wynyard as Bella Mallen in a beautifully understated performance suggests a quiet strength of character beneath the anguish and bewilderment.

The opening-out of the play may have distressed the playwright, but the writers and director succeeded in placing the action in a wider social context that remained faithful to the spirit of the original. In the very fine essay that accompanies the disc, Henry K. Miller argues that both the play and the film were part of a current of anti-Victorianism epitomised by the writing and publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Dickinson wrote years later,

I introduced into the film a large number of Victorian touches from childhood memories of my grandparents’ homes … and jumped at this chance to expose the worst side of the Victorian male’s attitude to women.

Almost certainly the scene where Mallen reads from the Bible at the dinner table, the servants standing respectfully apart, was Dickinson’s invention. The film also embodies a subtle critique of the Victorian class distinction which was still prevalent in 1940s Britain. It is the lower-class ex-detective Rough (Frank Pettingell) who brings Mallen to justice, and the hierarchical Victorian society that protects Mallen.

The British Gaslight is a distinguished film and its suppression by MGM for so many years is unforgivable. Nevertheless the American Gaslight directed by George Cukor is in its own way equally impressive. The core of the film—a husband attempting to drive his wife insane so he can search for jewels hidden in the house—is the same. But the treatment of the situation is unabashedly romantic. The wife, now called Paula, is the niece of the murdered woman. Her aunt was a famous singer and the jewels were a gift from royalty.

In the opening scene we see Paula’s haunted face as she leaves the house in the fog-shrouded darkness after the murder. One of the great strengths of this second version’s script by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston and of Ingrid Bergman’s performance is that we see Paula as a healthy woman in love before Charles Boyer’s Anton begins to torment her. (Essentially he is the same character as in previous versions, but this version has a new set of names.)

In an early draft of the script, in the final moments Anton tells Paula that he loved her all the time. When this reached David O. Selznick, who was acting as an uncredited special adviser, he was horrified and quickly drafted one of his famous memos arguing against using the line. When in 1980 I tried to question George Cukor about Selznick’s influence he replied by attacking the then recently published collection of the producer’s memos. Selznick, however, was in a position to enforce his views as he held the contracts of two of the stars, Bergman and Joseph Cotten. His interference was bound to be resented, but in this case Selznick was right.

Still, Cukor and his writers were onto something. By first showing Paula’s wooing by the coldly manipulative Anton, the later cruelty plays like a perverted love story. Boyer and Bergman are superb in the sequences in which Anton convinces his wife she is going mad. Bergman, who observed a patient having a breakdown in order to get the character’s eye movements right, goes further than Diana Wynyard in portraying the mental disturbance—hunched shoulders, fear-filled eyes and outbursts of hysteria. Her rescuer, Brian Cameron, is no wily ex-detective but a handsome assistant to the commissioner; the kind of gentleman adventurer found in the John Buchan novels and in spite of his American accent played very well by Joseph Cotten with just the right touch of knightly chivalry. Cotten is also able to match Boyer in their confrontation scene:

Anton: I always knew you were dangerous to me.

Cameron: I always knew you were dangerous to her.

Cukor worked instinctively and was no montage theorist; his great strength was the direction of actors. Nevertheless he had excellent visual taste, and the style of Gaslight is clearly influenced by William Wyler and Gregg Toland’s use of deep-focus photography in The Little Foxes and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane with its low-angle set-ups of ceilings to suggest oppression. Cukor seems to have persuaded MGM’s ace cinematographer, Joseph Ruttenberg, to combine this deep focus with low-key lighting, filling the frame with shadows in a style that was later to be called film noir. The director also had his way with the design, filling the set with dark Victorian furniture and increasing amounts of bric-a-brac as the heroine’s situation becomes more desperate. Not that Cukor ignored the British original. While he did not copy Dickinson, the montage of hands searching was impossible to resist and a similar sequence is used very effectively in a different context.

So which Gaslight is the better film? There really is no answer to this question. But for me, comparing them like this enriches our appreciation of the artistry of Thorold Dickinson, George Cukor and their collaborators. It is just a pity it took so long for us to be able to see both films.