![]() It’s remarkable that, as robust a presence as she is, she convincingly plays a timorous victim. ![]() ![]() More than anything, “Gaslight” is a testament to Bergman’s acting skills. Girlishly trusting, passionately in love, tragically confused, hysterically terrified and implacably vengeful by turns, she runs a strenuous gamut of emotions to play her final scene as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy. (Cukor also employed a third star, Joseph Cotten, as a sympathetic, if unlikely, representative of Scotland Yard.) Mainly, however, the movie gives Bergman full rein. Where the play was confined to a single claustrophobic set, the movie is opened up to include scenes in Italy and the Tower of London. The movie, he wrote, “has pulled such a ticklish assortment of melodramatic camera tricks that the audience was giggling with anxiety.” Among the many tactics used to unnerve Paula was the hiring of an insolent Cockney housemaid (18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first movie role). Reviewing “Gaslight” in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther equated the husband’s mind games with the director’s. There, for reasons that become obvious to the audience long before Paula is able to grasp them, he convinces her that, as she puts it, she does “senseless, meaningless things.” He also proceeds to frighten her out of her wits, in part by dimming the gaslights in the house and blaming it on her imagination. Traumatized by the murder of her aunt, a well-known opera singer, Paula Alquist (Bergman) is inveigled by her new husband, Gregory Anton (Boyer), a fortune seeker, to taking up residence in the abandoned house where the killing occurred. A British adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, released in 1940 as “Gaslight,” cast the Austrian émigré Anton Walbrook as its duplicitous villain the following year Hamilton’s play opened on Broadway with Vincent Price as the smooth-talking husband and ran for 1,295 performances. “Gaslight,” in which a diabolical husband plans to drive his wife mad through a campaign of false accusations, fabricated memories and bland denials of his previous statements, had two successful iterations before the Cukor film. The verb “to gaslight,” voted by the American Dialect Society in 2016 as the word most useful/likely to succeed, and defined as “to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity,” derives from MGM’s 1944 movie, directed by George Cukor. Sometimes a title becomes a verb: To “gump,” from “Forrest Gump,” is to insert a fictional character into a historical situation. Being only steps away from Main Street Gardens your dogs will love it here too.As a popular art, movies inevitably enrich our lexicon with their titles - “Dirty Harry” is a term for rogue cop and “Star Wars” a moniker for a missile defense system. LSGLofts boasts the most convenient parking of any of the downtown Dallas apartments and includes complementary guest and visitor parking. These downtown Dallas lofts have a price point for everyone, they range in size from a 565 square foot efficiency to the 2,950 square foot penthouse. The black on black appliances accentuate the art deco styling throughout. Each apartment has 3cm Sliver Waves solid granite counter tops in both the kitchen and bath with under-counter mounted sinks and upgraded faucets. The historic lobby below the high rise apartments takes you back in time to 1932 with all of the handcrafted finishes still intact. There are dozens of floor plans to choose from within these downtown Dallas lofts, almost all of which have fantastic views. These brand new deluxe downtown Dallas apartments are in the Main Street district yet only a short two block walk away from the recently privatized Dallas Farmers Market. Where Art Deco style meets modern luxurious living and inexpensive rents.
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