1944 signaled a high-water mark for film noir with the release of Double Indemnity. The film codified elements that we now think of as genre tropes: the detective delivering backstory via voiceover, the shadows of Venetian blinds on the wall. But, really, Double Indemnity is Barbara Stanwyck’s film; her Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale to end all femme fatales, seduces a detective and gets him to help her bump off her husband. If there was ever a role Stanwyck was going to win a competitive Oscar for, it was this one. Unfortunately for her, she had to compete against Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
Whether George Cukor’s Gaslight is a noir is up for debate…literally. In 2017, Turner Classic Movies encouraged people to debate this exact topic. Bergman’s Paula is anything but a femme fatale. She is psychologically abused for most of the film’s runtime by Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), the man she married after just a couple weeks of dating, and the man who is after her family money. It certainly has all the elements of scheming and conspiring and slime that we’d come to expect from a noir, but Gaslight feels rooted in older-school melodrama.
Gaslight is famously where the term “gaslighting” comes from, even though the actual gaslight part of it is a more minor example; throughout the film’s runtime, Gregory hides things and tells Paula she lost or stole them to make her question her own sanity. He is plainly villainous and terrifying. He hires Nancy (Angela Lansbury in her film debut) as a maid and instructs her not to talk to Paula. He convinces Paula that she’s too unwell to leave the house, and when she threatens to go to an important social event without him, he immediately changes his mind about going and delivers wicked double entendres like, “You didn’t really think I’d let you go alone, did you?” Maybe he thinks this sounds chivalrous, but we know it sounds like a threat. Gregory creeps around the attic, looking for Paula’s aunt’s jewels, but tells her she’s imagining the noise.
Gaslight is full of couples and doubles in a way that feels positively Victorian (even if it takes place during the Edwardian era). The house Paula and Gregory live in once belonged to Paula’s late aunt Alice; both women sing professionally and bear a striking resemblance to each other. Paula and Gregory’s shadows are like characters of their own, too; in one of the film’s most stunning scenes, Cukor’s camera sees its main couple into a bedroom, but it’s Gregory’s shadow that tells Paula’s shadow that she can’t leave the house. From this, two realities emerge: There’s the real world that Paula starts in, where she is a perfectly sane society lady, and the one that Gregory constructs, where he can bend life to his whims and prohibit his wife from leaving her home.
Paula becomes both the lady of the house and the madwoman in the attic, to borrow a phrase usually applied to Victorian novel Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, which, as it so happens, was also turned into a 1944 film, Jane’s stay at Mr. Rochester’s home quickly sees strange things happening. As his governess, she hears noises and voices in the attic, to say nothing of the fire that mysteriously starts in the middle of the night. Later, as she’s set to marry Rochester, there is a scandal at the altar: He is already married. His wife Bertha fell victim to congenital madness, you see, so he kept her locked and hidden in his attic. It was the only thing he could think to do. Jane runs away in the middle of the night, but returns later in the novel. Bertha has since burned the entire house down and died, and Rochester is disabled in the process. Jane agrees to marry him, and they look together toward the future—one that presumably doesn’t end with Jane in the attic.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that won’t happen, just as there was never a guarantee that the man Paula quickly married wouldn’t try to drive her to madness. While Gaslight isn’t a straight adaptation, this influence, and the Jane-Bertha dichotomy, plays out in the single character of Paula. She must hold both realities and both experiences because the man she was supposed to be able to trust has thrust them upon her.
Paula tries to trust Gregory, even as he makes it clear repeatedly that he doesn’t trust her. In one scene, a painting goes missing from the wall; Paula swears she didn’t move it, but Gregory won’t take her word for it. (A likely thing for him to do, since he moved it.) When he asks both of the housemaids if they touched it and they say no, he takes their word for it. Paula meanwhile swears on a Bible that she didn’t touch the painting, but it’s not enough. She’s on her way to the attic, and she sees herself being replaced with Nancy, a newer model.
Nancy and Paula have the same haircut, so you know where this is going. Nancy is younger, and Gregory flirts with her right in front of Paula almost as soon as we meet her (and denies doing so—this feels the most contemporary of all the examples in Gaslight of how “gaslight” is used today). We hear a lot about Nancy from other people; she likes to go on dates, and is decried by another character as “scandalous.” But she is also in control of her life in a way that Paula is not. She makes her own money and gets to go out some nights, with or without a male companion. Within the relatively theatrical acting in Gaslight, Lansbury’s performance is the most naturalistic, which also gives the character a feel of modernity. If Gaslight is a noir, it’s Nancy, not Paula, who’s the femme fatale—sexy, conspiring, dangerous.
Maybe there’s a reality where Paula could live on her own terms like Nancy—or like Jane—if she wasn’t fenced in by her family name and her station. Paula isn’t allowed to act out, to be “crazy,” because the expectations for how the high-class woman needs to conduct herself are too specific. Her episode at the piano reception—the one time where she could have gotten help outside of the house—is brushed off. Gaslight is hardly sympathetic to Nancy, but it’s worth mentioning that in 1944, the image of a working woman held all the patriotic connotations of the war effort. Even though Gaslight was set in the past when it premiered (in the years following 1875, specifically), it depicts its protagonist as a woman already falling behind.
In the end, Paula does take control of her destiny, confronting her husband alone while he’s tied to a chair. She taunts him and gleefully plays the role of the madwoman before letting the police have him. Paula looks toward the future, finally, with Inspector Cameron (Joseph Cotten). He, presumably, won’t gaslight her. In the coming years—even in the coming months with Double Indemnity—it will be the detective who gets corrupted by the women. But the idea of the “crazy” woman, in actuality put in this constructed role by a man, is one we would spend the next 80 years unpacking.