Best Actress: Ingrid Bergman I
The movie that introduced the term 'gaslighting' into the zeitgeist.
This movie is infuriatingly awful to Ingrid Bergman's Paula: haunted by a lingering memory of her aunt's murder and swept up by a whirlwind romance with Charles Boyer's Gregory Anton, she quickly begins having 'hallucinations' where she hears footsteps in the attic, the gaslights dimming in her room, and misplacing items. Is she really experiencing anything she feels or is it all in her head? Is Gregory slowly driving her mad or is it the caustic maid (played devilishly by Angela Lansbury in her first screen role)? And why is Joseph Cotten following her around?
Gaslight is so perfectly, tightly wound there's not a second of it wasted. Ingrid Bergman, as the troubled, worrying Paula, descends so believingly into perceived madness that it's both terrible and amazing to watch her act her way through it all.
That final scene in the attic, when the police have Gregory/Sergis tied up and his crimes are revealed—that he's been 'gaslighting' or convincing Paula and everyone around her that she's mad when he's in fact hiding the 'stolen' items, thumping around in the attic searching for her aunt's jewels, and turning on a light upstairs, draining the gas from the other rooms in the house and dimming the lights—Ingrid delivers a masterclass. It all runs over her face. Her posture changes, the set of her mouth, the look in her eyes, as she realizes that she isn't going mad, that it's Gregory's complex history with her aunt that has led him to frame her. It's like watching a pendulum: you think she's going to cut him loose, that perhaps his claws are too deep into her psyche at this point, but then she reveals that she's still in charge, and that she's going to leave him to the police.
Ingrid in this whole movie is a wonder, but for that final scene alone, give her three more Oscars.
I definitely didn't appreciate Gaslight the first time I saw it. For an actress of her stature and for all of her films that have endured to this day, it especially blew my mind that she wasn't nominated for Casablanca. I know I walked away from this movie thinking "Oh, well, they failed to nominate her for that, and they nominated her for For Whom the Bell Tolls instead, and then Jennifer Jones won, so they had to reward her the next year, and it just so happened to be Gaslight." (My mind works weirdly, sometimes.)
But now, now that I've seen this again—and let me confess that I've had many opportunities to rewatch this whenever TCM replays it but I have refused because of that mindset—and now that I have more Ingrid films under my belt, I see this for what it is: a masterclass performance in a masterpiece film. I'm by no stretch a Charles Boyer fan, but even he impressed me!
Ingrid was nominated against Claudette Colbert (Since You Went Away), Bette Davis (Mr. Skeffington), Greer Garson (Mrs. Parkington) and Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity).
I think I know who'd win the popular vote all these years later, and I'm about to say something controversial: I really don't get the hype of Double Indemnity. Maybe I should rewatch it soon. Anyway, I'd have voted for Ingrid or Claudette here, I love both those movies; and whenever I see Mr. Skeffington and Mrs. Parkington near each other I wonder if they ever met. (Which is a ridiculous thought, I know.)
DID I LIKE GASLIGHT? Much more than I remembered liking it, which is to say YES!
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Did you like Gaslight? What are your thoughts on Ingrid Bergman's first Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
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