Gaslight (1940 film)
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- This article is about the 1940 film Gaslight. For the 1944 film see Gaslight.
Gaslight is a film based on the Patrick Hamilton play Angel Street. It was released in Great Britain under the title The Murder in Thornton Square in 1940; when it finally was released in the United States in 1978, it was rechristened Gaslight to capitalize on the memory of the Charles Boyer-Ingrid Bergman version familiar to American audiences.
The plot focuses on a young woman haunted by the murder of her aunt in a London townhouse that has lain vacant since the crime. Years later she is persuaded by her new husband to return in order to overcome her anxieties. She soon finds herself misplacing small objects and hearing odd noises, and before long her spouse has her believing she's losing her sanity.
This screen version, directed by Thorold Dickinson and starring Diana Wynyard, Anton Walbrook, and Frank Pettingell, adheres closer to the original play than the remake, which early on revealed the husband's sinister intentions, and cast handsome leading man Joseph Cotten as the detective who solves the case, as opposed to the heavyset, rougher, and older Pettingell.
