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.