“Gaslight” presents the creepy plot, taken from Patrick Hamilton’s play, “Angel Street,” of a wife (Ingrid Bergman) being systematically driven out of her mind by her husband (Charles Boyer) while he looks for some precious jewels that he failed to find when he murdered her aunt years before. The method of the husband, who is himself unconvincingly insane in his attachment for precious jewels, is to undermine his wife’s belief in herself in every way—he steals her jewelry and then accuses her of having absentmindedly lost it; he proves to her that she is also capable of stealing from him; each night the gaslight in her room peters out and noises start which scare her out of her wits but which she has been told are her own hallucinations; he keeps her penned up, friendless, in a depressing London apartment and then hires a maid to plague her to death. The effect of his treatment is just about to do the trick when a kind detective (Joseph Cotten) steps in and saves her sanity.
Up to about the time that the detective starts dogging the husband’s footsteps, the picture builds a good, convincing, morbid relationship between the man and his wife out of a series of conversations, and acting bouts within them, among Boyer, Miss Bergman and a maid, who is acted at a fine, surly, unbecoming level by Angela Lansbury. The quality of the Victorian rooms where these bouts occur is such as to give you the right feeling that the wife is also being buried alive; the pace is a dreary, lifelike one, and the complications of the husband’s Iago-like maneuvers and his wife’s being caught by them—somewhat too accommodatingly—are worked out with an unusual degree of emotional subtlety for the movies. A lot of the credit for the quality of these scenes is due to Miss Bergman, who is able to strike variations of hysteria, perplexity or love that make actually static episodes seem more than adequately flexible and meaningful. It is true that she is one of the few actresses who are expected—and allowed—to do this in films. Her acting zeal and ability sometimes run her on unnecessarily, like a runner who is unable to stop immediately after finishing a race, but she gives a nice rendition of an unwary and unworldly woman being hurt and bewildered, and, in the first part of the picture, her more notorious ability to portray the most adoring and lovely of wives makes the nature of the tragedy and the cruelty seem even more extreme.
As the film progresses, it is loosened up to include a stock detective mystery involving sterotyped mystery problems, people who act the oldest kind of detective-fiction personalities, and devices that are supposed to be hair-raising but are only reminders of what may have scared you in your childhood. The melodramatic turn events take is in the interest of bringing out Miss Bergman’s character alive, but it turns what had been a moving duel of two people’s wits into a laboring, distraught organism which will remind you of the kind of mystery stories Earl Derr Biggers used to write. For the most, however, it is morbidly successful and has a good deal of intelligent writing and direction—plus, of course, Miss Bergman.
May 22, 1944