You know, mum, you just imagine things.
In spite of the fact that I had never seen Gaslight the film -- either version -- or the stage play they're both based on before today, I've long been familiar with the concept of "gaslighting." That may explain why I never felt the pressing need to seek it out, even if the 1944 remake is the film that won Ingrid Bergman her first Academy Award as Best Actress. The third film in this semester's City Light Film Series (after La dolce vita and The Incredible Shrinking Man), Gaslight was also nominated for Best Picture, but somehow George Cukor failed to get a nod for his direction, which artfully teases out the story's central mystery and frames Bergman's performance as a newlywed being methodically driven to the brink of insanity by her husband, played by Best Actor nominee Charles Boyer.
When they first meet, Bergman's Paula Alquist is in Italy studying to be a great opera singer like her late aunt and Boyer's Gregory Anton is her accompanist. She gives up her singing lessons to marry him, though, and to please him they move into her aunt's London house, which Paula left behind a decade earlier since that was where she was found strangled to death. Soon after they move in, though, Gregory begins an insidious assault on Paula's sanity, telling her she's becoming forgetful and losing things, and doing everything in his power to keep her petrified and housebound. And it certainly doesn't help matters that Mary, the new housemaid (Angela Lansbury, receiving her first of three nominations for Best Supporting Actress), undermines her at every turn as well. Lucky for Paula, she has Scotland Yard detective Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) looking after her, even if he can't convince his superiors that a ten-year-old cold case is worth reopening. Dame May Whitty rounds out the cast -- and provides a welcome dose of comic relief -- as a murder-mad neighbor who more than lives up to her nickname, "Bloodthirsty Bessie."