GASLIGHT To Be Lit Again
Warner Bros. 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 a total of 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.
Also in the Gaslight cast were Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, Barbara Everest, Halliwell Hobbes, and Heather Thatcher.
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 somewhat slow-paced Cukor version. In the 1940 original (renamed Angel Street in the U.S.), Austrian actor Anton Walbrook (best remembered for The Red Shoes) plays the villain, while Diana Wynyard (Academy Award nominee for Cavalcade back in 1932-33) is 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 (which in Britain was retitled Murder in Thornton Square), 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 Dickinson’s Gaslight still exist. In fact, the film has been shown on Turner Classic Movies several times.
I should add that 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.
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Tags: Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Classic Movies, Crime Movies, Diana Wynyard, Gaslight, George Cukor, Ingrid Bergman, Joe Wright, Murder in Thornton Square
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They should leave those old classics alone. MGM was able to make a good movie, but today I don’t think they will no matter how much money they spend.