Directed by: George Cukor

Starring: Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Everest

Adapted by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John L. Balderston from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1938)

STORY

In the fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, young Paula Alquist is haunted by a terrible memory: the brutal murder of her beloved aunt, a famous opera singer, inside their home at No. 9 Thornton Square.

Years later, after leaving London and studying music in Italy, Paula believes she has finally found happiness when she falls in love with the charming and attentive Gregory Anton. Their romance moves quickly. They marry, and Gregory persuades Paula to return with him to the very London house where her aunt was murdered.

Almost immediately, something begins to feel terribly wrong.

Objects disappear and then turn up in unexpected places. Pictures vanish from the walls. Paula hears footsteps coming from the sealed attic. Most disturbing of all, the gaslights in the house mysteriously dim — yet Gregory insists that nothing has changed.

Again and again, Gregory tells Paula that she is forgetful. Confused. Unwell. He isolates her from friends and neighbors, questions her memory, humiliates her in public and gradually convinces her that she can no longer trust her own mind.

But Paula is not imagining what is happening.

As Gregory's carefully constructed deception closes around her, Scotland Yard detective Brian Cameron becomes suspicious. He remembers Paula's murdered aunt and begins investigating both Gregory and the strange events occurring inside No. 9 Thornton Square.

What follows is one of classic Hollywood's greatest psychological battles — a terrifying portrait of manipulation, control and a woman fighting to reclaim the truth that someone else has deliberately taught her to doubt.

Ingrid Bergman gives one of the defining performances of her career as Paula, moving from radiant young love through fear, confusion and psychological devastation before finally finding the strength to trust herself again.

Charles Boyer is chilling precisely because Gregory rarely needs to behave like a conventional movie monster. His weapons are words, doubt, isolation and deception.

And from the flickering gaslights of Thornton Square came something extraordinary: a movie title that eventually became part of our everyday language.

Today, when we speak of someone being “gaslighted,” we are describing the very psychological manipulation at the center of this unforgettable film.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
THE MOVIE THAT GAVE US A WORD

Few classic films have left such a remarkable mark on everyday language.

The term “gaslighting” grew from the central idea of Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light and its screen adaptations: deliberately manipulating someone into questioning their own perceptions and sanity.

The dimming gaslights are particularly sinister because Paula can actually see them changing. Gregory nevertheless constructs an elaborate campaign designed to convince her that what she sees, hears and remembers cannot be trusted.

More than eighty years later, the title has escaped the movie screen entirely and become shorthand for psychological manipulation.

INGRID BERGMAN WON THE OSCAR

Paula Alquist became one of Ingrid Bergman's most celebrated performances.

Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Gaslight — her first Oscar. The performance demonstrates her extraordinary ability to make Paula's gradual psychological deterioration believable without losing the character's humanity.

The film itself received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won two Oscars: Bergman's Best Actress award and the award for its art direction/interior decoration.

ANGELA LANSBURY'S VERY FIRST MOVIE

Watch the young maid Nancy carefully.

That is Angela Lansbury in her motion-picture debut.

Lansbury was still a teenager when she made Gaslight, yet her performance immediately attracted attention. Playing the flirtatious and insolent maid opposite established stars Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, Lansbury more than held her own.

Her first film performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

It was quite an entrance for a woman who would go on to enjoy one of the longest and most beloved careers in entertainment history.

THERE WAS ANOTHER GASLIGHT FIRST

George Cukor's Gaslight was not the first screen adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's story.

A British version directed by Thorold Dickinson had been released in 1940, starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard.

When MGM pursued its lavish American adaptation, complicated rights issues surrounded the earlier film. AFI records that MGM eventually obtained the screen rights to the London production, while rumors later circulated that the studio had attempted to eliminate copies of the British version. Fortunately, the earlier movie survived.

FROM THE STAGE TO MGM

The story began with British playwright Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light. After its London success, the play reached Broadway under the title Angel Street, opening in New York in December 1941.

That Broadway production starred Judith Evelyn, Vincent Price and Leo G. Carroll and became a long-running success before Hollywood created the version that would make the title famous around the world.

INGRID WANTED GASLIGHT

Ingrid Bergman's connection to the material began before MGM's cameras rolled.

According to information preserved by AFI from Bergman's autobiography, she became interested in the story after seeing the play on Broadway. David O. Selznick controlled her contract at the time, complicating her ability to pursue the property herself.

Eventually Bergman got the role — and it became the performance that brought her first Academy Award.

AINTOID: BOYER NEEDED A LITTLE HELP

Hollywood glamour sometimes required practical engineering.

Ingrid Bergman was taller than Charles Boyer. Bergman later recalled that during one of their romantic scenes, Boyer stood on a box to compensate for the difference in height.

The sinister Gregory Anton apparently had no objection to a little assistance from the prop department.

AINTOID: THORNTON SQUARE IS PART OF THE TRAP

The house at No. 9 Thornton Square isn't simply a setting — it becomes another character in the movie.

Its enormous rooms, shadowy staircases, locked attic, heavy furnishings and pools of darkness create a world in which Paula increasingly feels imprisoned.

The production design was important enough to earn the film one of its two Academy Awards, while cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg's black-and-white photography helped transform the Victorian house into one of classic Hollywood's most memorable psychological prisons. AFI credits Cedric Gibbons as art director, Edwin B. Willis as set decorator and Ruttenberg as director of photography.

AINTOID: CHARLES BOYER'S QUIET MONSTER

Gregory Anton doesn't need a knife, a gun or a supernatural power to frighten us.

He weaponizes Paula's trust.

A misplaced object becomes proof that she is forgetful. A sound becomes evidence of imagination. An emotion becomes proof of instability.

That restraint is precisely what makes Boyer's performance so unsettling. The audience knows Paula is being manipulated while watching her slowly lose the ability to know it herself.

AINTOID: THE GASLIGHT REALLY DOES DIM

One of the story's most ingenious details is also remarkably simple.

When Gregory secretly enters the attic and turns on its gaslights, the limited gas supply causes the lights elsewhere in the house to dim.

Paula sees it happen.

Gregory's psychological trap depends upon convincing her that even something she can see with her own eyes isn't real.

That tiny fluctuation in light became the enduring symbol of the entire story.

DATE RELEASED

May 4, 1944 — New York City