This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week the theme is "Gaslighting". Now, a lot of people will probably think of the Ingrid Bergman movie, although that was not only based on a 1938 play "Gas Light"; that play had already been made into a movie once before, in the UK. The 1940 UK version shows up once in a while on TCM, although obviously not as often as the more famous movie. Both movies are quite good. Of course, it would have been too easy to use either or both of them for this theme, so I decided to go with three other movies:
Shock (1946). A woman who is shocked to find her husband was, in fact, not killed in action in World War II, and is heading to a big-city hotel to be reunited with him. But across the way from her hotel room, she witnesses Vincent Price killing his wife, and the shock leaves her in a catatonic state. Fortunately for her, there's a psychiatrist around who can cure her. Unfortunately, that psychiatrist is Vincent Price, who pretty quickly figures out what's going on and tries to gaslight the woman into believing there really was no murder.
Witness to Murder (1954). Barbara Stanwyck is a spinster who returns home one evening to her apartment; looking out the window, she sees George Sanders committing a murder! But when she calls police detective Gary Merrill, he goes to the apartment and finds... nothing. Sanders too knows what's up, so he decides to gaslight Stanwyck to get the police to believe that she's going insane.
36 Hours (1964). For a different sort of gaslighting movie, try 36 Hours. James Garner plays a US Army Major in the days just before the D-Day invasion. The Nazis know he has some sort of valuable information, but not what, so they drug him, kidnap him and take him to Germany, and while he's under the drugs make it look like he's aged several year, and that the war is over. A German army major (Rod Taylor) then plays American in order to debrief Garner about his mission, trying to gaslight Garner into yielding all the details of a mission that allegedly took place several years back, but in reality hasn't taken place.
1 comment:
I love that you chose 36 Hours and totally forgot about it. It’s an excellent film and quite under-rated. We match with the Stanwyxk flick which is quite good and I love George Sanders. I have not seen your other choice.
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