Do you know what the most difficult part of watching older movies is? It's not that it's in black-and-white. It's not that it's boring. It's the acting. For what I would call an embarrassingly long time, the acting profession as a whole did not learn how to act in front of a camera. They just acted like they would on a stage.
In some movies, this is less of a problem because there's not necessarily an emphasis on the acting or there just aren't many complex emotions in the movie. For example, just about every Jimmy Stewart movie features Jimmy Stewart playing Jimmy Stewart, so it doesn't feel like he's acting. Which... is basically what we want to see. We don't want to feel like the actor is acting. And when they perform as if they are in a large theater, you notice how much they're trying to act.
I bring this up specifically in this post, because Gaslight was this close to really standing out as one of my favorite movies ever. But that pesky acting. Specifically, Charles Boyer's performance... lacks charm. There is essentially no indication given in this movie as to why exactly Ingrid Bergman would fall for him. She just does. This is a weakness that is just hard for me to ignore.
Again, asking an actor to pull off the dual role of being charming, loving, and then making that same person seem believable as someone who was also capable of being vicious and manipulative... that was simply not a thing in 1944. Boyer is manipulative from the get go, but not in a particularly subtle way. It's not the dialogue's fault. Boyer just plays him as openly manipulative immediately.
It's just over an hour of us getting to watch a woman doubt herself while an obviously manipulative man lies to her face over and over. And if Boyer had done a better job of seeming convincing at the beginning, it would have been more effective and horrifying. And it's not completely his fault. The script asks us to accept she would love him completely based on... one loving scene with her and he very quickly gets to work on manipulating her to live in London.
Ingrid Bergman fares better, but if Wikipedia is to believed, this is considered to be up there for the greatest performances ever. That would be an exaggeration in my opinion. She's very good in the movie though, and up until the scene where she confronts him, plays it a lot more subtle than some actors would at the time. I can definitely see why see won an Oscar for her performance.
Also nominated was Boyer, and well, my complaints aside, he does play the manipulative husband well, and Angela Lansbury in her first ever movie. Yes, that Angela Lansbury, who was either 18 or 19 when this was filmed. She's good, but the nomination might fool you into thinking she has a greater presence in this movie than she actually does.
Aside from the performances, I think my greatest issue with the film is just that it ends up dragging. The length is not the problem, but with how the film chooses to spend that length. The movie speeds through plot in its first 10 minutes to get to the movie's setup, and then for over an hour, we get a variation of roughly the same scene over and over again.
All in all, I'm making it sound like I didn't think this was a good movie. But I think it is. I think the movie certainly has too many scenes of Bergman's character doubting herself and her husband purposefully misleading her, but only by about 10-20 minutes. It's actually very effective in showing how someone, specifically a woman, can be gaslit. There is no surprise why the term gaslight is named after this movie.
Have Boyer dial down his performance early in the movie, maybe add a scene or two of them falling in love in place of the manipulation scenes, and this would be one of the best movies. But I think it falls just short for the reasons I laid out above.
3/4 stars
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