Trailer
Plot summary
In Victorian London, the opera singer Alice Alquist is murdered in her home and her jewels disappear. Her niece Paula, left an orphan, is sent to Italy to study singing, and there she marries her accompanist, Gregory Anton after a short courtship. He persuades her to settle in London, in the house she inherited from Alice. Paula finds a letter from a man named Sergis Bauer, and Gregory reacts violently. A young maid, Nancy, is hired and takes her orders from Gregory rather than from Paula. Paula loses a brooch, paintings vanish from the walls, and she hears noises from the boarded attic while the gaslights dim. Gregory tells her she is unwell, and Brian Cameron of Scotland Yard, an admirer of Alice, notices Paula.
Cast
- Tom Stevensonas Williams
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gaslight (1944)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- MGM bought the remake rights with a clause insisting that all existing prints of the 1940 British film be destroyed, even trying to destroy the negative; that order was evidently not honored to the letter, since the 1940 Gaslight remains available for screenings and on DVD.
- Self-help and popular psychology authors turned the film's title into a verb: gaslighting came to be defined as manipulating a person or group into questioning their own sanity or reality, in a way similar to how the film's protagonist is manipulated.
- Gaslight gave Angela Lansbury her start on screen: she plays Nancy Oliver in the film, and it was the first film role of her career.
- To avoid confusion with the first film, George Cukor's version was originally released in the UK under a completely different title, The Murder in Thornton Square.
- In 2019 the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
