The Big Idea Behind GASLIGHT

Gaslight was based on a successful London stage production of 1938 called Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton. A British production was filmed by director Thorold Dickinson in 1939. The U.S. film rights were acquired first by Columbia, then by MGM, who handed it to one of their top directors, George Cukor. The adaptation by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston was very faithful to the original.

Although the heroine, Paula, is one of her best-known roles and the one that earned her the first of three Academy Awards, Gaslight was almost not an Ingrid Bergman picture at all. The story was bought in 1941 by Columbia Pictures as a vehicle for Irene Dunne. Metro later acquired the rights, intending it for Hedy Lamarr. Cukor, however, wanted Bergman, but the increasingly fragile and disturbed young wife was not a role independent producer David Selznick wanted to allow his hottest contract star to take on. Bergman herself had doubts; she was a tall, strong, robust young woman and feared she couldn't pull off the frailty required of the character. But Cukor convinced her that was exactly what he was looking for. "She wasn't normally a timid woman; she was healthy," Cukor explained years later. "To reduce someone like that to a scared, jittering creature is interesting and dramatic. You have to avoid letting people play scenes before you get to them. It would have been dangerous to cast the kind of actress you'd expect to go mad, the kind you know from the first moment you're in for a big mad scene."

Once Bergman was convinced, there was no stopping her from playing the part; not even Selznick could refuse her the role. The next big hitch came when Charles Boyer's management insisted on top billing for the French star, who was then the "Great Lover" of the screen. It was an uncharacteristically villainous role for Boyer, which made it all the more attractive to him. First and foremost an actor of integrity and taste, Boyer later welcomed the receding hairline and slight paunch of middle age that would break him out of the romantic "continental lover" mold. With Gaslight he saw one of his earliest opportunities to stretch, but he had also been a star several years longer than Bergman, and his agent felt taking second billing would be seen as a sign that his prestige was fading. But Selznick was adamant ­ if one of his top stars was to be loaned out to the biggest and most glamorous studio in Hollywood, she would have to get prime billing. (For a time, there was talk the role would go to Greer Garson, then one of MGM's leading actresses.) Bergman, however, didn't care; she desperately wanted to work with Boyer and Cukor, and she wasn't above resorting to a great show of tears and high theatrics to bring her boss around to her way of thinking.

It also helped that MGM promised to beef up the role of the Scotland Yard detective assigned to Joseph Cotten, another Selznick contractee, and put his name above the title as well. With Bergman sandwiched between the two male stars, the billing looked more like the sexual symmetry studios went for in their advertising (think of Katharine Hepburn framed by Cary Grant and James Stewart in Cukor's The Philadelphia Story, 1940). Selznick gave in, clearing the way for one of the most memorable screen duos ever.

By Rob Nixon