Gaslight

Maybe this isn’t the most natural place to turn first when one is looking to nurse a budding crush on Charles Boyer: he plays his cruel husband-with-an-agenda with alarming intensity. Well, all right… that’s not exactly unsexy. And intensity that man can play, from ardent lovers to smooth sociopaths. Ingrid Bergman is his tortured wife, gradually unraveling as the seeds of insanity from both heredity and witnessing her aunt’s murder as a young girl are perhaps coming to fruition, now newly wed and returning to the spooky home in which the murder took place. It’s a moody and genuinely exciting thriller, although the culprit and outcome are certain from the start. It is watching the mindgames unfold that keeps the thing chugging along in a dark and devilish way. Bergman’s choices are interesting, I would really cite this as a masterstroke of sylized cinematic work far from something realistic (as far as hysteria goes, this is on the other end of the spectrum from Gena Rowlands’ work in Woman Under the Influence) — not surprising for the era, but there’s something strange in it… one moment it works in mysterious and surprising ways, the next it’s almost laughable in its broadness. Still I feel it is a shrewd and above all interesting performance. This is also Angela Lansbury’s film debut, and she is hilarious as their saucy maid. Top-notch stuff all around.