Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944) | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Caution: potential spoilers ahead for ‘The Girl on the Train’.
The recent Netflix release
The Girl on the Train is an official adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s novel of the same name. The bestseller revolved around a concept introduced in a play in 1938 that was made widely known by movie adaptations in 1940 and 1944.
Patrick Hamilton’s
Gas Light gave the English vocabulary a ready shorthand term to describe psychological damage caused by sustained emotional manipulation and deception. The word “gaslighting” is now commonly used to refer to a form of abuse that makes the targets party to their own destruction. Gaslighting is a state especially familiar to women, who are often told by the men in their lives that they don’t know or mean what they say and are being needlessly anxious or paranoid.
The New York Times,
1 J. Hoberman wrote a short review of a newly released Blu-ray version of
Gaslight that features both George Cukor’s 1944 film and Thorwold Dickinson’s 1940 version. The piece is titled
“
Gaslight Hasn’t Lost Its Glow.” Upon reading the piece, the title of the review becomes somewhat curious. While acknowledging that Ingrid Bergman is ‘a great actress’, Hoberman goes on to dismiss the Cukor film as a vehicle for her talents. In contrast, he asserts that “…the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more ecomonical (running half an hour shorter), more brutal (opening with the murder of an elderly woman and the killer ransacking her flat), and a lot nastier.” His high regard for Dickinson’s film is based on slight grounds. The implication seems to be that the director is treating the material as a hardy piece of working class British entertainment. For Hoberman, MGM gave