I never claimed that she did.
I don’t know what “gaslight” means and I’ve never seen this movie. Strikes me as a rather obscure reference.
I read the short story first, so the movie wasn’t a surprise.
Very obscure. Google returns only 22,200,000 results for the word “gaslight” and “gaslighting” has its own Wiki entry (note the photo is from the film):
The word traces to the stage play that the movie above is based on, but the movie (which garnered seven Oscar nominations, including a win for Best Actress by Ingrid Bergman) is credited with its widespread adoption.
So, an obscure reference for a generous interpretation of the term obscure.
by obscure, I was referring to the movie.
You may not have encountered it, but it’s certainly not obscure (although not as universally known as RivkahChaya says. I’ve seen it used frequently on the board.
The movie is not obscure by any stretch of the imagination. But anything is obscure if you personally haven’t heard of it.
It’s a great movie, make sure to watch the Ingrid Bergman version, not the original.
What bugs me about the new found popularity of the word gaslight as that people use it to mean lying and don’t understand the extra component of it. It’s not just lying, it’s convincing the person that they’re confused/losing their mind.
What I tend to hear are things like ‘I totally gaslit my brother yesterday. I ate his doughnut but told him dad took it’ where it should be ‘I totally gaslit my brother yesterday. I ate his doughnut but told him that he ate it. He spent the next hour really confused about how he could have eaten a doughnut without realizing it’.
Really? The play the movie was based on was called Angel Street.
But thanks for the support! I appreciate it.
I think the past tense should be “gaslighted.” I know that the past tense of “light” is “lit,” but the word being used as a verb here, was originally a noun, a compound noun of gas + light. If you were to take the noun “light” and use it as a verb to mean something like pelting someone with lightbulbs, you wouldn’t use the irregular past tense that the verb form takes-- you say you “lighted” the person, if for some reason you needed a creative verb, and didn’t just want to say you “threw lights at him.”
So “gaslight,” as a verb should be regular.
I’m trying to think of another example of this, but it’s too damn late, and I have to be up in three hours, and I’ve only slept 90 minutes tonight, so far.
Would these qualify as twists everybody knows?
- The Maltese Falcon: The falcon is a fake.
- Chinatown: Evelyn Mulwray’s sister is her daughter.
I checked, and we are both right. The play originated in the UK in 1938 as Gas Light, but when it was staged on Broadway in 1941, it was titled Angel Street. (and before then, it was staged in Los Angeles under a completely different title, Five Chelsea Lane). There was even a British film in 1940 titled Gaslight, but retitled Angel Street when it was finally released in the United States.
I knew I knew this! Thanks for the vindication. I took drama in high school, and every month we had to read a play, and turn in a report on it. This was one I read, so I was sure of the title, because I bought my reading copy in a used bookstore for like, $.79, and it was on my bookshelves for years after, until all the books went into storage.
I have seen the earlier film, and it is really awful, especially in comparison to the Bergman-Boyer version. The camera work is so uninspired, they could just have set up a camera in the proscenium of a theater where the play was running, and filmed it, and the acting is marking time. It looks like a mid-run rehearsal-- you know, when the actors have done the development rehearsals months ago, and already done many performances, and the initial excitement over the play had dwindled, and now it is running only on weekends, so on Wednesday afternoons there is a rehearsal, and nobody is working hard, just sleep-walking through their lines and business. That’s what the movie looks like.
Admittedly, it’s one of those rare animals where the stage script is not that great, but the film script is fantastic. It usually doesn’t happen that way. Usually only really great scripts even get bought by studios, so the odds already disfavor the screenwriter being able to improve upon them, but someone at MGM saw something in it, and got the great John Van Druten to excavate it. The screenplay is magnificent.
ETA: It just dawned on me that there’s a great deal of irony in the word “gaslight” taking on the meaning it has, because the title was ironic in the first place. Gregory does all these things to drive Paula mad; however, the dimming of the lights he is not doing deliberately. It’s merely happening as a result of his going into the attic, but Paula thinks she is imagining it, since it just happens that no one else sees it the first couple of times. The dimming lights she attributes to her encroaching madness, and it powerfully affects her-- it’s actually more effective than anything Gregory is doing deliberately.
You are lucky. Apparently, one of the conditions of the MGM purchase of rights was that all copies of this film be destroyed. So there were only a few surviving copies by the 50’s.
That was nearly always a condition when a film was remade. It rarely succeeded. The Fredric March Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was supposed to be destroyed. The Irene Dunne Magnificent Obsession was supposed to be destroyed. There’s a huge list of films that were supposed to be destroyed, but weren’t.
A lot of times, distributors simply pulled copies from distribution, but retained them, and many films were already in the hands of private collectors, and there was nothing anyone could do to force someone to destroy their own property, as long as it had been legally obtained.
I have no idea what movie this is. Did I miss it being mentioned before?
A Big Hand for the Little Lady. Mentioned way earlier in the thread. (Easy to miss. I had to scroll up and do quite a bit of searching to find it.)
I know we’re getting a bit off topic here and I haven’t seen this movie since forever (and it doesn’t appear to be streaming on anything I have), but, I thought she asked him about it a few times and he convinced her it was in her head. From then on, each time it happened she spiraled further downward. I thought at one point she even went and measured it or had to relight it or something that gave her actual real proof it was happening, but he was convincing enough that her mental breakdown just got worse and worse.
It is considered one of the greatest movies of all time. It is very well known by people that know movies or at least watch TCM.
Just curious, do you know what a McGuffin is?
He may not have heard of it, I don’t think they have McDonalds north of the Artic Circle
Well, if he hasn’t heard of a McGuffin or MacGuffin, then it pretty much means he’s not a movie buff or TCM watcher. If you’re neither and under the age of 70, It is far more reasonable that you never heard of Gaslight.