Maltese Falcon. 
OK, so then I’m surprised you don’t know Gaslight. I recommend when you get a chance, watch this movie. It is a little slow by today’s standards, but so well done and acted.
Oh, bonus, look for a young Angela Lansbury in what I think was her first movie.
Well, then I should see it. I can’t stand her…
I see a lot of movies, and I’ve never heard of The Others. Is it worth finding?
It was pretty good. But it wasn’t a big movie.
Kind of a slower paced horror movie. Felt like a throwback actually to the well done horror movies of the 50s or 60s.
I went from thinking Kidman wasn’t much of an actress, to realizing that she is an actress that often got crappy roles. She’s excellent in The Others.
That scans. I got the impression that it was covering a non-short interval.
Forget it, he’s rollin’
Gaslight was Angela Lansbury’s first movie. She was 17 when it began filming, but she turned 18 during filming. In 1944, there was already a lot of laws in place regarding protection of child performers, and one had to do with a social worker being on the set any time a minor was involved.
There is a scene at one point where Lansbury lights up a cigarette, and the social worker would not let 17-yr-old Lansbury do this. They had to put off filming this scene until after her 18th birthday.
She is great in the role-- perfect, as a matter of fact. She must have blown away all the competition in the audition, though, to have made MGM decide that they wanted her enough to put up with the child labor laws at the preliminaries, and the beginning of filming.
BTW: Looked up images of the 1-sheet for Gaslight, and for the Bergman-Boyer MGM film, it is one word.
I love old movies, and have since I was a kid-- like nine or ten, and I don’t consider them slow. Gaslight, in particular, is very, very suspenseful; change the timing to pack in more action, and you reduce the tension, which would ruin the movie.
It’s probably true that more action movies are made today than once were, so on average, the pacing of films has picked up, but if you look only at suspense films that are fairly compared to Gaslight, they having similar pacing. They may have a few “jack-in-the-box” moments, where something jumps out at you, which spikes the tension, and then momentarily relieves it, instead of keeping it at a steady climb, but that has as much to do with the availability of FX techniques as anything.
I actually recently (well, really almost a year ago) had a conversation like this with my brother, who works in the film industry. He was a CGI tech for about 15 year. His first job was doing FX for the shows Xena & Hercules, and he also worked on Avatar; he didn’t work on Titanic itself, but he was an editor on the documentary about the making of Titanic, and became good friends with James Cameron, which led to the job on Avatar. Recently, has has been trying to break into screenwriting. He has some script editing and “additional dialogue” credits, and wrote one stage play that was moderately successful, but then was adapted into a graphic novel which has been really very successful so far-- it’s been out only a couple of months, and is about to hit the break-even mark, at which point instead of his modest royalties, he will start getting a percentage based on his investment (and so will I!)
Sorry for the hijack-- I’m just very proud of him. Also, gives his bona fides regarding suspense films.
I’m trying to think of a very recent film that was suspenseful, and not action-packed, with a Gaslight-like pace. Unfortunately, I have seen few films since my son was born. However, I can think of The Blair Witch Project from 1999, 21 years old, yes, but considerably older than Gaslight in 1944, very slow-paced, and very, very suspenseful.
@What_Exit On the whole, though, I agree with you regarding Gaslight. Superb acting-- Bergman’s “because I am mad” speech is brilliant:
And, of course, directed by George Cukor.
I think old movies aren’t slow as long as you’re not comparing them to today’s movies. I love old movies as well and one reason for that is, the further you go back, the more the movie has to rely on storytelling instead of special effects. So, sure, they’re slower in the sense that they have less going on visually, but they’re often much denser stories. I have a friend that will write off any movie filmed in black and white. If it’s not in color it’s ‘boring’. To a certain degree, I can understand that if you were born in the 90’s and raised on Matrix and Fast and the Furious movie franchises, you not going to get a real big thrill out of Rear Window. In fact, I finally got him to watch Twin Peaks and I think he hated every minute of it. No amount of explaining could get him to understand that Twin Peaks was the Dexter of the 90’s (Dexter being the big show at the time he was watching Twin Peaks).
Try The Following. It’s Christopher Nolan’s First film. I got lucky and actually found it on Netflix and watched it before Momento got released, or at least before it became super popular and Christopher Nolan became a household name.
It’s a still a thriller and there’s some action, but it’s very much a slow burn.
Fly out, in the baseball sense of “a ball hit in the air”. When a batter hits one to an outfielder, she is said to have flied out, not flown out or flew out. Stephen Pinker used this as an example in The Language Instinct. IIRC, he said that the original verb fly has the irregular past tense flew, but, the verb fly in the baseball meaning comes from the noun fly (which comes from the original verb). And this chain of transmission somehow enforces regularity on the past tense of the baseball verb. Thus fly, flew, flown - v., to travel through the air => fly, flies - n., a baseball hit into the air => fly, flied - v., to hit a baseball into the air.
I may be misremembering some of this, but the upshot is that yes, I think the past tense of gaslight is gaslighted.
Wow. Thank you!
Missed the edit window, but I just thought of something interesting, and I looked it up in a couple iof sources just to check: when “alight” meant to light a candle (or something), the past tense is “alit,” but when it means to exit a vehicle, the past tense is “alighted.”
I don’t know the etymology of “alight” in disembarking, but it’s an unrelated word, a connotative meaning, or derived from a noun form, I assume. I can’t think of what else it could be. In any case, it loses its irregularity.
Golf clap
A bird alights on a branch. This would be the end of its flying, for the moment. Hence, in a conveyance, one is traveling, and ending that travel by exiting the conveyance is alighting.
etymology online says it’s from the sense of lightening the load on a horse or a vehicle by descending from it.
So “alight” to get off, and “alight” to be kindled, are different words, with different etymologies, which is why one if regular, and one is irregular-- albeit, I guess “alight” is in strict sense, and adjective, but there’s a verbal back-formation.
Not to be all anecdotal, but my inner teenager still fondly remembers Weaver’s shucking out of her jumpsuit (?) down to her undershirt and panties. Which only illustrates that many men never really mature as they age.