Gaslight (British National Films, D&P Studios, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 2) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies: the 1940 British film of Gaslight, directed by Thorold Dickinson from a script by A. R. Rawlinson and Bridget Boland based on a 1938 play called Gas Light (two words) by Patrick Hamilton. A year after this 1940 film, Hamilton’s play was adapted for Broadway under a new title, Angel Street, and MGM bought the movie rights to Angel Street but changed the title to Gaslight (one word, as in the British film) and in 1944 made an artistic masterpiece that was also a blockbuster commercial hit, directed by George Cukor from a script by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston. It also won the Academy Award for Ingrid Bergman as Best Actress (the first of her two). Not wanting a cheap distributor to pick up the rights to the 1940 British Gaslight and pass it off as their movie, MGM bought all rights to the 1940 Gaslight and ordered all prints destroyed. Fortunately, director Dickinson was able to have a bootleg print struck from the original negative; he concealed it in his home and it was subsequently rediscovered. In Dickinson’s version, the female victim is called Bella Mallen and is played by Diana Wynyard, while her husband and tormentor, Paul Mallen, is played by Anton Walbrook. In Cukor’s, they were renamed Paula Alquist and Gregory Anton and were played by Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The 1940 Gaslight is in the same category as the 1922 silent Camille with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino, and the 1931 The Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels: a solidly produced film of real quality eclipsed by an even better remake.

The biggest weakness of the 1940 Gaslight as compared to the 1944 version was the elimination of the long prologue at Lake Como in Italy, in which the heroine first meets the villain and falls in love with him. Instead the Dickinson original begins with the villain, unseen at the time except in a couple of long-shots that clue us in to the fact that Walbrook’s character is the killer as soon as we meet him full-face, strangling and killing Bella’s aunt, Alice Barlow (Marie Wright). His motive is robbery, specifically to steal her ample cache of jewels; no sooner has he offed her than we see him rifle her jewel box like a bargain hunter at a particularly attractive sale. Alas, the real prizes of her collection are a batch of uncut rubies which she’s hidden somewhere else in her home – but where? Five years later the crook, going under the name “Paul Mallen,” has married his original victim’s niece and leased the same house in which Aunt Alice lived so he can continue his search for the priceless rubies at his leisure. Bella is suspicious that she’s losing her mind, though of course it’s really Paul that is quietly playing tricks on her and making her doubt her sanity. She first thinks she’s going crazy when the gas light in her bedroom dims because Paul is searching the house next door for the elusive rubies, and since the gas connections are linked every time he turns on the gas in the house next door to look for the gems, it dims the lights in his own house. After forcibly keeping her at home on the basis that her doctors have already declared her insane and if she leaves, she’ll prove it to them and get herself committed to a mental hospital, he finally lets her go to a benefit concert at a private home. Only he insists that she wear a brooch which she can’t find – he’s really stolen it and hid it in his own desk drawer – and at the concert he accuses her of stealing his watch, which he really planted in her purse. He makes such a big commotion about this that not only do the other members of the audience react, so does the pianist who’s giving the concert, and the two make an early exit. Later Paul chews out Bella for starting an embarrassing scene in public, when we know it was all his fault. He even makes his two maids, Elizabeth (Minnie Rayner) and Nancy (Cathleen Cordell), swear on a Bible that they didn’t steal his watch, and when Bella insists on doing the same, Paul thunders that she shouldn’t add sacrilege to all her other sins.

Paul is also carrying on an affair with Nancy, whom he takes to a music hall, even though Nancy already has a boyfriend, Cobb (Jimmy Hanley). The good guy in all of this, who was played by Joseph Cotten in the 1944 film, is Rough (Frank Pettingell, who played Sir John Falstaff in the 1960 British TV miniseries An Age of Kings – and quite frankly played him wretchedly, going way over the top, in one of the few casting glitches in that otherwise generally well-acted series). While Brian Cameron, the character Cotten played in the 1944 version, was an active-duty police officer, Rough is a retired police detective who worked the original murder of Alice Barlow while he was still on the force and got obsessed with it. Ultimately Rough persuades Bella that she’s really sane and it’s her husband who is driving her crazy, and ultimately she’s able to overpower him, tie him up and threaten to kill him, saying that because he’s done such a good job of convincing people she’s crazy she can kill him with impunity. Eventually Rough gets two people currently on the police force to arrest Paul, and in a weirdly touching scene the cops let him fondle the now-found rubies just before they take him into custody. The final scene shows Bella, free at last, opening the doors to her back yard and stepping out into the sunlight, a symbol of her freedom from her oppressive marriage. David O. Selznick, who wasn’t involved in the 1944 Gaslight except through loaning out Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten to play in it, wrote a memo urging Cukor and his writers to copy that final scene in their film.

Overall, the 1940 Gaslight is a quite good film but one that pales by comparison to its near-perfect remake; one can certainly be grateful to Thorold Dickinson for preserving it. We can also be grateful that Dickinson obviously learned so much from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock; much of the 1940 Gaslight looks like a Hitchcock movie, with long, vertiginous camera movements; scenes taking place on staircases; and an overall atmosphere of darkness and gloom. Like the movie as a whole, the cast in this version is good but the one in the remake is even better. Diana Wynyard is great in the lead but Ingrid Bergman was even better (particularly in expressing the character’s heartbreak: it really helped that she got that extended prologue to show why she was so desperately in love with her husband, while Wynyard didn’t and we spend much of the 1940 Gaslight wondering, “Why doesn’t she just leave the S.O.B. already?”), and Anton Walbrook is fine but doesn’t do the romantic aspects of the character as well as Boyer. And while Frank Pettingell isn’t as insufferable here as he’d be as Falstaff in An Age of Kings, he’s a far cry from Joseph Cotten – even though one of Selznick’s criticisms of the 1944 version was Cukor and the writers hinting at a future romantic attraction between Bergman’s and Cotten’s characters. (Selznick thought that was a mistake, though in a way it brought the story even closer to Hitchcock and in particular his penchant for hero-heroine-villain love triangles.) While the 1944 Gaslight is clearly better than the 1940 version, it’s nice to have the earlier one available as a surprisingly good alternative.

Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert 2024/2025 (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, ORF, Sony, PBS, aired January 1, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 1) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched the annual Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which began in 1939 when conductor Clemens Krauss decided the Austrians needed a feel-good event to get over their takeover by the Nazis. So he started this tradition which mostly featured the music of the Strauss family: father Johann I, sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard; and Johann Strauss III, who was not Johann II’s son but Eduard’s! The event has become an annual tradition and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s televised by the state-owned Austrian broadcasting company ORF (short for Österreicher Rundfunk), which sends videos around the world to various countries that consist of the complete concert plus an ample supply of B-roll which can be edited by TV networks and stations any way they like. The American rights are held by PBS, which almost always shows only the second half of the concert. They also use a narrator – originally Walter Cronkite, then Julie Andrews (who had at least a faint connection with Austria since her best-known movie, The Sound of Music, takes place there – but in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, rather than Vienna), and now Hugh Bonneville. Hugh Bonneville is a heavy-set middle-aged British actor whose main claim to fame is as the lead on the long-running British TV series Downton Abbey, though at least he pronounces the “t” in “often” (a long-running in-joke between Charles and I). This year’s conductor was Riccardo Muti, whom I’m old enough to remember when he was a hot young 20-something firebrand on the podium; today, in his seventh appearance leading the New Year’s concert, he’s considerably older and nowhere near as sexy, though that’s true of all of us as well. He conducted in a businesslike manner, effective and efficient but not sparkling.

The concert – or at least the part of it we Americans got to see – began with Johann Strauss, II’s overture to his operetta The Gypsy Baron, whose Wikipedia page describes it as “[t]he story of the marriage of a landowner (returned from exile) and a gypsy girl who is revealed as the daughter of a Turkish pasha, and the rightful owner of a hidden treasure. [It] involves a fortune-telling Romany queen, a self-important mayor, a rascally commissioner, a military governor, a band of gypsies and a troop of hussars.” (In other words, it’s a few more chips from the operetta log, though music critics have suggested that Strauss’s music for The Gypsy Baron was edging past operetta and towards the greater sophistication of opera.) The next selection was also by Johann II (he’s by far the most famous of the Strausses and the composer of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” and the other Strauss works you’re likely to have heard of): the “Accelerations Waltz,” composed in 1860 for the Engineering Students’ Ball at the Vienna Sofiensaal (a legendary hall that was used for countless major recordings in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, until it burned down in 2001 and was rebuilt in 2013). The third piece was the first by a non-Strauss composer: Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr. (apparently the Strausses weren’t the only ones who kept it in the family; not only did he follow in his father’s footsteps as a musician but he became the director of the Vienna Conservatory and a string quartet on his dad’s retirement) whose official German title is Fidele Bruder March but was announced last night as “Merry Brothers’ March.” (My understanding was that “Fidele” meant “faithful,” not “merry,” but we’ll let that stand.)

Afterwards Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic played the Ferdinandus Waltz, composed by Constanze Geiger, one of the many women composers who have been dredged up from obscurity to satisfy the demands of orchestra leaders these days for more “politically correct” programming. Quite a few female composers have been brought into the light, including not only relatives of famous men (like Robert Schumann’s wife Clara and Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny) but people like Louise Farrenc and Mel (short for Melanie) Bonis as well as Florence Price, an African-American woman who faced the double whammy of being female and being Black. Geiger married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg und Gotha, though it was a “morganatic marriage” – meaning that she would get a noble title out of it but their kids wouldn’t. This march is a perfectly respectable piece of light music that fit in well with the overall program. The next few pieces were lesser-known works by the Strausses: Johann II’s “Either/Or Polka,” Josef’s “Transaction Waltz,” and Johann II’s “Annen Polka” and “Chit-Chat Polka.” After that came one of the big pieces: Johann II’s “Wine, Woman and Song” (though we could see on one of the musicians’ music stand the original German title, “Wein, Weib und Gesänge,” which struck me as odd because “Weib” means “wife,” not “woman” – the usual German word for “woman” is “Frau,” though even that usually means a married woman and an unmarried woman is a “Fräulein”). As he pretty much did through the entire concert, Muti conducted pretty much on autopilot, pacing the orchestra through well-judged tempi but not bringing much imagination or flair to the music.

“Wine, Woman and Song” brought the “official” part of the program to an end, but there followed the three obligatory “encores” (the word is in quotes because there’s really no question as to whether or not they’re going to happen). One is of a piece of the conductor’s own choice (and oh, how I wish someday a sufficiently subversive conductor would demand that the orchestra play Ravel’s “La Valse,” his destruction of the Viennese waltz tradition composed during World War I, in which Austria and France were on opposite sides) and the other two are Johann II’s “The Blue Danube” and Johann I’s “Radetzky March.” This time the conductor’s own choice was another work by Johann II: “The Bayadere (Quick Polka)” from a Strauss operetta with the engaging and intriguing title Indigo and the Forty Thieves (based on the Arabian Nights tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, with a German libretto by Maximilian Steiner, premiered in Vienna in 1871). Muti introduced a new wrinkle into the traditional performance of “Blue Danube”: the conductor is supposed to play the first few bars, then stop and say, in German, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a … ”, and then the orchestra chants in unison, “Happy New Year!” This time Muti did the greeting both in German and his own native language, Italian. What follows was a typical latter-day Muti performance: well played and decently paced but lacking the final bursts of energy that mark the difference between a good performance and a great one. (My all-time favorite “Blue Danube” performances are by Stokowski, Ormandy and Karajan.)

The final “Radetzky March,” written by Johann I to celebrate a particularly significant victory for Austria over Italy in the Battle of Custoza (1848), was added to the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts in 1946 by conductor Josef Krips, and in 2019 the Vienna Philharmonic commissioned a new orchestral arrangement to replace the original by Leopold Weininger, who’d written his during the Nazi era and therefore it was considered “tainted.” Overall this was a good if not great New Year’s concert, and I was amused that like some other conductors Muti turned away from the orchestra and towards the audience in the “Radetzky March,” as if he were compelled to conduct them. Midway through he turned away from both orchestra and audience, and towards the dancers in the big ballet numbers. If nothing else, this telecast answered a question I’d long had about these productions: were the dancers filmed “live,” in real time,to pre-recorded music piped in to the off-stage venues where they perform; or were they recorded and filmed earlier? This show made it clear that they’re dancing to pre-recorded music; that became clear when one of the dancers disappeared from one venue and reappeared in another much quicker than she could have got there by herself. It also featured an incredibly attractive Black male dancer whom I had the hots for almost as soon as he walked on and I could see what he was packing between his legs. In fact, the first number that included dancers featured four hunky guys and four slender but well-muscled women, and there were a couple of brief, blessed moments in which two of the male dancers hugged each other and did some kisses and joint steps on the dance floor. All in all, this Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert was acceptably entertaining but lacked the spark this venerable event can have – and oddly, for something I’d assumed would be one of the hottest tickets in Vienna, the shots of the audience sure included a surprising number of empty seats.

Sara Bareilles: Next at the Kennedy Center (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, aired December 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 31, 2024) PBS showed two episodes of the occasional TV series Next at the Kennedy Center, various performances filmed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. One was actually a rerun of the December 31, 2023 show featuring Cynthia Erivo with various guest performers (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/next-at-kennedy-center-cynthia-erivo.html); I gave that show an oddly lukewarm review at the time, focusing mainly on how much better the original versions of many of the songs were than the ones Erivo and her “friends” (Ben Platt and an amazing Black Hawai’ian named Joaquina Kalukango) gave us on that show, but I liked it a lot better last night than I did in 2023. The new show featured singer Sara Bareilles, whom I remember getting a free sampler CD promoting her first album. I played through it and decided it was nice but not so awe-inspiring as to get me to buy her CD. Last night she gave a truly stunning performance that made me wonder why I didn’t follow up with her then. She performed 13 songs, of which 11 were done with the National Symphony Orchestra (or at least a smaller ensemble drawn from it) conducted by Steven Reinecke. The other two songs, “Let the Rain” and “Soft Place to Land,” were done in a smaller room than the big Kennedy Center concert hall and featured Bareilles on guitar (mostly she played piano) with just two other musicians, Rick Moose (that’s what the chyron said!) on violin and Alan Hampton on acoustic bass. I had much the same reaction to Bareilles’s concert that I did to the most recent Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poets Department, when I got it a few days ago at the North Park Target. Like Swift, Bareilles is a quite good female singer-songwriter working in a genre that I didn’t realize is so popular these days, writing and playing songs that acknowledge the complexities of emotional relationships but don’t go overboard on the traumas. If I’d heard either of those works in a context in which I didn’t know who they were by and thought they were by singers with cult followings that sold maybe about 2,000 copies of their albums, I’d be calling all my friends and praising them to the skies, telling my buddies, “You have to hear this!”

It’s true that Bareilles’s songs sometimes made me think she has a small room in her home in which she lights candles to a photo of Joni Mitchell; not only does Bareilles have that same sort of light, soaring voice MItchell had in her prime, she writes songs that are equally gnomic and poetically sophisticated, though she doesn’t reach the levels of mind-boggling complexity Mitchell all too often did. The songs she played with the symphony are “Orpheus,” “Love Song,” “Once Upon Another Time” (the first song on which she brought out backup singers David Ryan Harris and Emily King, and on which her vibraphonist played with a violin bow on one of his instrument’s metal bars, creating an otherworldly drone effect), “Many the Miles,” “Armor” (a surprisingly political song inspired by Bareilles’s participation in the January 2017 March on Washington for women’s rights – she joked before the song that she was glad the Trumpian nightmare was over when both she and her audience know it’s just beginning all over again, and then she looked up to the ceiling as if talking to God and said, sotto voce, “Help!”), “Gravity,” “King of Anything,” “Saint Honesty” (written after she’d had an argument with her fiancé, actor Joe Tippett, whom she met while doing the show Waitress in which they played husband and wife; they started dating for real in 2017 and they’re still together), “Enough” (from Bareilles’s new show, The Intensities), “She Used to Be Mine” (a duet with Rufus Wainwright, whom obviously she likes a whole lot better than I do!), and her signature song, “Brave.” I quite liked Sara Bareilles’s show and it was a nice enough way to ring out 2024, a year which because of the terrible outcome of the Presidential election is a year I couldn’t wait to see the end of – just as I’m sure those of my political persuasion couldn’t wait to see the end of 1924, in which Calvin Coolidge won a full term as President after the Democratic Party melted down and did an even better job of destroying itself than it did 100 years later!