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DVD Gaslight
George Cukor helped transform a moody Victorian stage melodrama (previously filmed in Britain in 1939) into a gothic Hollywood romantic thriller. Ingrid Bergman stars as a meek, uncertain heiress courted and married in a whirlwind romance by the debonair Charles Boyer, but when they move back into her childhood home she begins losing her grip on reality and becomes convinced that her husband is trying to drive her insane. Joseph Cotten, rather stiff and colorless next to the anguished Bergman and charming and lively Boyer, is the heroic Scotland Yard detective who becomes enamored of the skittish woman who is slowly succumbing to madness. The grand, glorious sets and elegant photography recall Hitchcock's Rebecca, another lush Hollywood gothic melodrama of a retiring young wife overwhelmed by the history of her abode, and Gaslight is still assumed by some to be a Hitchcock film (the Bergman connection doesn't help the confusion). It's really a rather straightforward thriller with a forced plot device, but under Cukor's control the tightly constructed script is given the full MGM treatment, then reined in for intimate moments of harrowing suspense. Boyer brilliantly played off his continental lover reputation by adding an undercurrent of malevolence and Bergman won an Oscar for her haunted performance. It also marks the memorable debut of Angela Lansbury as a saucy maid unwittingly drawn into Boyer's master plan. --Sean Axmaker
"That house comes into my dreams sometimes - a house of horror"
GASLIGHT is a first-rate psychological suspense thriller which features the passionate Academy Award-winning performance of Ingrid Bergman in the role of Paula Alquist Anton, a young, fragile wife who is slowly being manipulated into a state of near-insanity by her sinister new husband Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer).
Having been traumatized by the murder of her aunt, the opera singer Alice Alquist, 10 years previously in London, Paula Alquist has been living and studying music in Italy in the years since that tragedy. It is there that she meets and impulsively marries the pianist Gregory Anton. Guided by Anton's wishes, the young couple moves back to London and back into the townhouse where the murder occurred. For the first time in 10 years, Paula declares to Anton, she is no longer afraid: "you've cast out fear for me...I've found peace in loving you. I could even face that house with you...Yes, yes, you shall have your dream. You shall have your house in the square." Yet, the townhouse still haunts her somewhat and, when her husband begins hinting about her forgetfulness ("You know, you are inclined to lose things, Paula") and seems to purposefully arrange situations which give him the opportunity to admonish her and treat her as an irresponsible child, she slowly begins to believe that she is losing her mind.
Joseph Cotten plays Brian Cameron, the Scotland Yard detective who has begun looking into the cold murder case of Alice Alquist after encountering Paula and Anton on one of their rare outings and having been struck by the resemblance between Paula and her famously beautiful aunt. His presence seems to accelerate Anton's malevolent campaign against his wife; he conspires to keep her home-bound and away from all social connections. Soon, he begins leaving Paula alone in the house every night, and she is tormented by the eerily dimming gaslights and the strange noises and footsteps she imagines around the house. A very young Angela Lansbury (in her first film role) plays the tarty, insolent maid Nancy, who is devoted to Anton and is openly contemptuous toward the increasingly fragmented Paula.
Through the expressionistic black and white cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg, the Academy Award-winning art direction of Cedric Gibbons, and under the taut direction of George Cukor, GASLIGHT evokes a heavy mood of Victorian-era suspense set in the hoary mansions and foggy streets of London. As Cameron meets Paula and the mystery unravels itself in a thrilling finale, one feels as if one were watching Alfred Hitchcock in one of his finest moments. Cukor did a truly fantastic job in a genre that was largely unfamiliar to him and GASLIGHT remains one of the finest gothic suspense thrillers ever made.
Jeremy W. Forstadt
"Between us all the time were those jewels."
About an unscrupulous man (Charles Boyer) slowly and methodically making his wife (Ingrid Bergman) think she's insane. Years earlier Boyer had murdered Bergman's aunt for jewels she owned, but he was never able to find them. When he learns that Bergman has inherited the aunt's house, he turns on the charm, gets her to marry him, and moves into the house with her. On the pretense of going to a room every night to write music, he sneaks upstairs to the attic, which has been sealed off, to search for the jewels. Meanwhile he torments Bergman, hoping to have her committed to a madhouse after he finds the jewels. But thanks to Joseph Cotton and Scotland Yard, all comes right in the end. Both Boyer and Bergman are excellent (Bergman took the Oscar), and they bring off the very tense climax powerfully. Angela Lansbury makes her acting debut as a servant girl, and plays her part to the hilt. Great entertainment; definitely worth a watch.
My favorite movie: how men drive women crazy
From a systems-theoretic psychological point of view this movie is the greates on how a husband drives his wife crazy. Boyer is a genius is every grimace, delayed reaction and raised eyebrow. Any woman who's ever been driven crazy by a man can instantly relate (and even laugh all through) this movie. I have seen it 18 times and enjoy it more each time. Not the front or the end so much as the priceless interactions of the two and the maids who "also hate her". Female competition is a real thing--"there's no house big enough for two women" and the "female help" is envious of the "mistress" and she knows it. She fears her husband and the maids alike, who are "on his side".
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation to "open up" the material from the home of the unhappy couple. The result may not be one of Hitchcock's deepest films, but it's a thoroughly engaging chamber movie. It also features Grace Kelly at her loveliest, the same year she made Rear Window with Hitchcock. Dial M for Murder was filmed in the briefly trendy 3-D process, and Hitchcock shot some scenes to bring out the depth of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Ray Milland - Grace Kelly Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 6 to 7 days
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A movie doesn't win seven Oscars for nothing. A glowing Greer Garson (Best Actress) commands the screen as Mrs. Miniver, a middle-class British housewife whose strength holds her family together as World War II literally hits their home. Walter Pidgeon as her architect husband seems to be the prototype for future TV dads in this affecting portrait of love--familial and romantic--during war. But the relationship between Mrs. Miniver's college-age son (Richard Ney) and the upper-crust Carol (Best Supporting Actress Teresa Wright) is filled with inherent drama--as the war speeds up their young love, it also has the potential to doom it. The 1942 film, which also won for Best Picture and Best Director, is filled with colorful characters, snappy dialogue, and sensational plot twists. Although... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Greer Garson - Walter Pidgeon - Teresa Wright Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Repeated viewings can't dispel the shock of the final scene in this classic 1941 romantic mystery--a brief but disorienting confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroine's mounting conviction that she's married a murderer, forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue that's preceded it. It's a masterful coup de grace for director Alfred Hitchcock, who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion, threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame.
As embodied by Joan Fontaine, who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director, Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up, bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life. Her solution materializes in... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Joan Fontaine - Cary Grant Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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