I find it odd how the term “gaslighting” has become so prevalent, when I’m betting the vast majority of people who use the word haven’t seen the film which inspired its current use.  I further assume most of them haven’t even heard of that 1944 picture starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.  In its own time, that was a movie with such a huge influence as to spawn a great many imitators.  For example, four years later brought the similar Sleep, My Love, which I believe may like even more than Gaslight.

My admittance of this is reluctant, as Bergman, the most physically beautiful woman to ever set foot on this planet, is nowhere to be seen.  Even more curious to me, the star is Claudette Colbert, whom I had rarely found charming, or even believable, in the works of hers I had seen up to the point.

The film opens with Colbert waking on a train she doesn’t remember boarding and doesn’t know where it is heading.  She disturbs the sleeping passengers as she runs screaming through the train corridors, until a middle-aged Queenie Smith and a doctor return Colbert to her compartment.  Smith isn’t even phased by the handgun she finds in Colbert’s handbag, but Colbert sure is alarmed to see her husband’s gun.  After disembarking in Boston and ensuring Colbert is alright, Smith is approached by George Coulousis, who asks her if everything went as planned.  She says it did—she used a fake name and everything.

I’m going to overlook how unlikely it is Colbert would run into her friend Rita Johnson in the Boston airport while waiting to fly back to NYC.  Johnson is a motormouth socialite who adds decent comic relief to the few scenes she’s in.  When we first meet her, she is there to see off her friend Robert Cummings, who will just happen to be on the same flight as Colbert.  Making an introduction between the two, Johnson says he had just come back from India.  He corrects her and says it was China.  Johnson brushes this off, saying of the countries, “They’re both over there somewhere”.

What he had been doing “over there” is running an airline with his brother.  Played by Keye Luke, I would have assume the family of Cumming’s had adopted this Chinese man as a boy but, no, it was actually Luke’s family which took him in as an honorary member of the family while he was serving overseas in WWII.  I thought this was an interesting tangent, as it does not factor into the primary plot, and instead just adds some interesting character shading.  Especially interesting for its time is the wedding between Luke and Marya Marco, as the scene is neither condescending towards Asians nor does it regard them as mysterious “others”.  It just might be the most reasonable portrayal of the race I have seen in a major studio Hollywood picture of the time.

Colbert had been Cummings’s date for the wedding and it is obvious these two would make a great couple.  Unfortunately, she will have to return home eventually, and that’s where husband Don Ameche waits.  It is spoiling nothing to say he is trying to convince her she’s insane, but the interesting aspect of the plot is how we will try to do this.  You see, Coulouris had been hired by him for various tasks, including posing as a psychiatrist scheduled to come to the house to see Colbert.  Then he disappears and the real doctor appears, making it seem Coulouris was a figment of her imagination.  Then he keeps reappearing at different times.

It is obvious Ameche is up to something, as he tells detective Raymond Burr he happened to shoot himself in his right arm while cleaning his pistol.  That is just to establish a story where he can claim Colbert shot him and then ran off to Boston with the gun.  Burr is a lousy detective, because he sees Ameche shortly after this and the man’s arm is completely fine, when it had been hanging limp by his side earlier. 

Ameche is conducting this ruse because everything the couple has is Colbert’s property.  It is surprising she comes from old money, as she is so quirky and full of cheer.  She does odd things like calling the conservatory “the jungle”, because the proper name for the room is so pretentious.  As Johnson says of the family: “They’re all so unsophisticated, like really sophisticated people are.” 

They are also, in Johnson’s words, “desperately healthy”, so Ameche will need to get his A-game going if he has a chance of getting her committed, just so he can run off with the sultry Hazel Brooks.  Hers is a character as attractive in her physique as her personality is monstrous. It is an interesting demonstration of why the male black widow is drawn to the female.

Ameche and Brooks have some great noir banter, such as this exchange between them after he gives her a large bracelet covered with a great many emeralds: “I thought it would make you happy.” “You thought it would make me patient.”  Clearly, emeralds will not suffice: “I want everything she’s got.  I want her house, her name, her man.  And I want them now.”

The cast is incredibly solid all around, and this especially surprised me about Colbert, who is more interesting and likeable in this than in anything else I have seen her in.  She makes for a great screen couple with the always-reliable Cummings.  Ameche is interesting as the endlessly and diabolically scheming husband.  For some reason, I always think of this actor as the age he was when he did Cocoon several decades later, which is baffling to me, as I haven’t seen that film.  Coulouris is quite menacing, and I  wonder what Smith, as his wife, ever saw in him.  It is odd the couple has Brooks staying with them, presumably only for the duration of this scheme.  This makes for a strange trio, but Smith is especially friendly towards the younger woman, even if she somehow pronounces Daphne (the name of Brooks’s character) as if it has three syllables.

There are many surprises to be found in Sleep, My Love, even if the central plot mechanism was a bit overfamiliar even then.  That is was directed by Douglas Sirk is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, as he would be remembered almost exclusively for his almost operatic melodramas, eight of which starred Rock Hudson.  This noir is proof everybody get their start somewhere, and it is good enough that I wish he continued with this genre for longer.

Dir: Douglas Sirk

Starring Claudette Colbert, Robert Cummings, Don Ameche

Watched on Olive Films blu-ray