Gaslight To Be Lit Again
by Andre Soares
Warner Bros. Pictures has begun developing a remake of Gaslight, the 1944 thriller directed by George Cukor, and starring Charles Boyer as a suave murderer and Ingrid Bergman as his naive - and quite wealthy - wife, who almost goes bananas before the final fadeout. The film received seven Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Angela Lansbury, in her film debut), and Best Screenplay (John L. Balderston, Walter Reisch, and John Van Druten), winning in the Best Actress and Best Art Direction categories. Additionally, Bergman won a Golden Globe for what is one of the weakest performances of her career.
British filmmaker Joe Wright, who directed last year’s well-received (and not very good) adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, is supposed to make his American directorial debut on the new Gaslight, while Abi Morgan (of the 2004 British miniseries Sex Traffic) is currently scheduled to write the update, which will be set in contemporary California instead of Victorian London.
Before you criticize today’s Hollywood for having absolutely no imagination, it’s worth remembering that the 1944 version was already a remake of a British film - which many consider superior to the glossy and slow-paced Cukor version. In the 1940 original (renamed Angel Street in the U.S.), Austrian actor Anton Walbrook (The Red Shoes) plays the villain, and Diana Wynyard (Academy Award nominee for Cavalcade) the am-I-crazy-or-am-I-not wife. Thorold Dickinson directed. The plot in both films was taken from Patrick Hamilton’s stage play.
MGM, the studio responsible for the 1944 remake, reportedly ordered all prints of the 1940 version destroyed so as to avoid comparisons with their film. If that is indeed true, the ploy didn’t work, for copies of Gaslight still exist. In fact, the film has been shown on Turner Classic Movies several times.
The still from the 1940 Gaslight was found on the Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger site, which has loads of pictures and information about the British directors of A Matter of Life and Death (1945), Black Narcissus (1946), and The Red Shoes (1948). Well worth visiting.
Note: In Britain, the MGM remake was retitled Murder in Thornton Square.
Hollywood Foreign Press Association 2005 Golden Globe Award winners and nominees
List of the British Academy of Film 2005 nominees
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