The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019| 15

culture

As a popular art, movies inevitably en-
rich our lexicon with their titles — “Dirty
Harry” is a term for rogue cop and “Star
Wars” a moniker for a missile defense
system.
Sometimes a title becomes a verb: To
“gump,” from “Forrest Gump,” is to in-
sert a fictional character into a historical
situation. The verb “to gaslight,” voted
by the American Dialect Society in 2016
as the word most useful/likely to suc-
ceed, and defined as “to psychologically
manipulate a person into questioning
their own sanity,” derives from MGM’s
1944 movie, directed by George Cukor.
“Gaslight,” in which a diabolical hus-
band plans to drive his wife mad through
a campaign of false accusations, fabri-
cated memories and bland denials of his
previous statements, had two successful
iterations before the Cukor film. A
British adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s
1938 play, released in 1940 as “Gaslight,”
cast the Austrian émigré Anton Wal-
brook as its duplicitous villain; the fol-
lowing year, Hamilton’s play opened on
Broadway with Vincent Price as the
smooth-talking husband and ran for
1,295 performances.
Although featuring a major star as the
villain, Charles Boyer, cast against type,
Cukor’s film differed from previous pro-
ductions. It strengthened the part of the
abused wife — largely overshadowed by
actors playing the abusive husband —
by giving the role to a great actress: In-
grid Bergman.
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. There, for reasons that be-
come obvious to the audience long be-
fore Paula is able to grasp them, he con-
vinces 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 imagina-
tion.
Reviewing “Gaslight” in The New
York Times, Bosley Crowther equated
the husband’s mind games with the di-
rector’s. The movie, he wrote, “has
pulled such a ticklish assortment of
melodramatic camera tricks that the au-
dience was giggling with anxiety.”
Among the many tactics used to un-
nerve Paula was the hiring of an insolent
Cockney housemaid (18-year-old An-
gela Lansbury in her first movie role).
Where the play was confined to a sin-
gle claustrophobic set, the movie is
opened up to include scenes in Italy and
the Tower of London. (Cukor also em-
ployed a third star, Joseph Cotten, as a
sympathetic, if unlikely, representative
of Scotland Yard.) Mainly, however, the
movie gives Bergman full rein. Girlishly
trusting, passionately in love, tragically
confused, hysterically terrified and im-
placably vengeful by turns, she runs a
strenuous gamut of emotions to play her
final scene as though it were a Shake-
spearean tragedy.
More than anything, “Gaslight” is a
testament to Bergman’s acting skills.
It’s remarkable that, as robust a pres-
ence as she is, she convincingly plays a
timorous victim. Hollywood rewarded
her with an Oscar, and Alfred Hitchcock,
who had made two analogous gothic
thrillers, “Rebecca” (1940) and “Suspi-

cion” (1941), in which Joan Fontaine coped with a sketchy spouse, cast Bergman in two upcoming pictures, “Spellbound” (1945) and “Notorious” (1946). For its part, MGM undertook to gaslight audiences by pretending the British movie never existed. The studio tried to destroy all prints; that the first “Gaslight” survived at all may be cred- ited to the director Thorold Dickinson’s foresight in making a personal copy. Like the movie’s horrible husband, MGM had a reason. Bergman’s bravura performance aside, the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more economical (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. Walbrook ma- levolently lords over his pathetic wife (Diana Wynyard). Unctuously pious, he’s clearly unhinged as well as openly predatory in making the housemaid his mistress. (Cathleen Cordell is a lot taw- drier than Lansbury as well.) There’s a terrific bit of business where the pair go off to the music hall to catch some French cancan dancers. More than a tough little thriller, the 1940 “Gaslight” is a sardonic portrait of a bad marriage between a couple that turns out to not even be married. Still, when the film finally made its tardy way to the United States in 1952, Crowther found it inferior to the Cukor version:

“The street sets are plainly artificial, the atmosphere seems laboriously con- trived and the direction of Thorold Dick- inson is perceptibly casual and slow.” By then, the plot became overly famil- iar. In addition to Hitchcock’s two kin- dred gothics, other versions of this fe- male noir included Joseph H. Lewis’s “My Name Is Julia Ross” (1945), Vin- cente Minnelli’s “Undercurrent” (1946) and two Anatole Litvak 1948 melodra- mas, the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle “Sorry, Wrong Number” and Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit.” “Gaslight” was dramatized on the radio and sati- rized on TV. By the time Robert Aldrich made “Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964) in which Joseph Cotten and Oliv- ia de Havilland conspire to undermine Bette Davis’s sanity, the verb “to gaslight” had made its way into both popular culture (used in sitcoms as early as 1952) and psychoanalytic discourse. Maureen Dowd may have been the first to apply the “gaslight” to politics. Her 1995 op-ed piece, “The Gaslight Strategy” playfully described the Clin- ton administration’s attempt to provoke the speaker of the house, Newt Ging- rich, into making irrational outbursts. In Gingrich’s case, she thought such a scheme was unnecessary: “You can’t Gaslight someone who is already a little lit.” True or not, we’ll see if this term, so commonly used in the last presidential election, continues to have relevance in the next.

The 1944 version of “Gaslight” can be streamed via Amazon Prime, Vudu and YouTube; the 1940 version is available from Amazon Prime, iTunes and Vudu.

‘Gaslight’ hasn’t lost its chill

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WARNER BROS. HOME ENTERTAINMENT

Above, Ingrid Bergman as a naïve wife with Joseph Cotten in “Gaslight.” Left, Charles Boyer as Bergman’s husband and Angela Lansbury as a maid.

STREAMING

The film’s title has entered

English discourse, and

Ingrid Bergman’s indelible

BY J. HOBERMAN

Book critic’s rule No. 117: When the
late-summer doldrums hit, when New
York City is halitotic and iced minted
tea is a meager defense, turn to liter-
ary Brits to cool your spine and crisp
your produce.
Mary-Kay Wilmers’s new book,
“Human Relations and Other Difficul-
ties,” is a selection of her essays and
book reviews, most of them published
in The London Review of Books, the
sure-footed and high-minded biweekly
paper she co-founded in 1979 and has
presided over as sole editor since 1992.
These pieces range from considera-
tions of writers such as Jean Rhys
(“she was always incredibly lonely
because in her own mind no one else
existed”), Alice James and Sybille
Bedford to essays about obituaries,
child rearing and the nature of seduc-
tion.
Wilmers is a feminist who has
skirted the margins of feminism. About

her young married life in the 1960s (she has two sons with the British film director Stephen Frears), she writes: “It seemed to me that if my conscious- ness were raised another millimeter I would go out of my mind.” In the same essay, which is about Germaine Greer, menopause and remaining attractive (or not) in older age, Wilmers writes: “I won’t believe it isn’t harder to be a woman until the day, should it ever come, when the balance of power is so drastically reversed that women can get into serious trouble, lose their jobs or be dispatched to the gulag, for making jokes about men.” This book’s cover, Peter Campbell’s drawing of the author while she’s making a sketch of male genitalia from museum sculptures, is one for the ages — a flinty subversion of the male gaze. Wilmers is a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Didion-Elizabeth Hardwick-Janet Malcolm school of dispassionate restraint and psychologi- cal acuity. She can do more damage with a raised eyebrow than most crit- ics can do with a mace. Her wit steals in like a cat through an unlatched window. “There is nothing so undignified as an editor who writes,” the English novelist (and former editor) Luke Brown wrote in his brisk 2014 novel “My Biggest Lie.” There’s nothing undignified about Wilmers’s writing at all.

She was born in Chicago, but as with T.S. Eliot — another American, with whom she worked in the 1960s at the London publishing house Faber & Faber — a British facade became the entire edifice. Her reputation was warmed up in almost sitcom fashion when Nina Stibbe, who had worked as a nanny for Wilmers and her family in the early 1980s, wrote a fond and semisatirical memoir titled “Love, Nina” (2014). It caught the bohemian chaos of the Wilmers household. Reviewing that book, I described its portrait of Wilmers this way: “She’s skinny; she

smokes; she brings her floppy-haired boyfriends around; she stares at the ceiling when she wants to let you know you’re being an idiot.” Wilmers has perfected the art of staring at the ceiling in print as well. Reviewing a book called “The Faber Book of Seductions,” she writes: “If one were to judge English literature by this anthology one might wonder why plain women bothered to read books at all.” The essays in “Human Relations” feel sturdy, built to last. Book critic’s rule No. 118: When necessary, find a tenuous link between two new books and yoke them together.

Wilmers began her career, as men- tioned, at Faber & Faber, the venerable English publishing house — the long- time home of writers including Eliot, W.H. Auden, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes (for many decades this was indeed a boys’ club), Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. In a new book titled “Faber & Faber: The Untold Story,” Toby Faber, the grandson of the company’s founder, relates this house’s story as it cele- brates its 90th anniversary. He does so ingeniously, compiling it from original documents — letters, memos, catalog copy, diary entries. It’s a jigsaw puzzle that slowly comes together. Faber & Faber didn’t make every writer happy at every moment. James Joyce once referred to the firm as Feebler and Fumbler. Hughes quoted a friend who called it Fagin and Fagin. But from the start, this was a publisher with a high purpose — to publish literature as opposed to trash, at least nearly all of the time. As Eliot com- mented in a 1952 letter, his ambition with certain books was “not to make money, but to see that we lose as little as possible.” This is, in many regards, a business book. You may learn more than you wanted to know about things like laminates and cartridge paper require- ments. Faber’s founder, Geoffrey Faber, had his back to the wall at many moments, and was more than once

almost forced to shut down or sell out. Faber had its share of luck. The fluke success of “Cats,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on Eliot’s po- ems, helped subsidize many later and more obscure projects. More often a kind of Dunkirk spirit prevailed. Geoffrey Faber was a rock, and clearly a great-souled man. He’s a bit of a rock in print as well — his letters and diary entries evidence nobility but rarely shine. The details here do consistently shine, however. Eliot took a pass on George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” and “Animal Farm.” Faber missed a chance to publish Joyce’s “Ulysses.” There were close calls. William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was rescued from the slush pile after already being rejected by one editor. Faber came up with the superb title. Golding had wanted to call it “Strangers From Within.” The snippets of Larkin’s letters are excellent. Faber wanted him to drum up sales by doing readings, but he demurred. “I think they belong to the demimonde of poetry,” he wrote. “Un- less one is extremely impressive in the flesh,” he added, “one gets more divi- dends from keeping out of sight, as people’s imaginary picture of you is always so much more flattering than the reality.” Book critic’s rule No. 119: Finish review, head to neighborhood bar. Bring book.

Anglophiles. Check. Bibliophiles. Check.

BOOK REVIEW

Human Relations and Other Difficulties:
Essays
By Mary-Kay Wilmers. 260 pp. Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. $27.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story
By Toby Faber. Illustrated. 426 pp. Faber
& Faber. $28.

BY DWIGHT GARNER

Toby Faber.

VIA FABER & FABER Mary-Kay Wilmers.

ANDREW O’HAGAN

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The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

‘Gaslight’ hasn’t lost its chill

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