Cinema Classics: Gaslight

Reese De’What introduces the 1944 thriller Gaslight through a series of black-and-white scenes featuring Paula and her husband Gregory. What begins with Gregory denying that the room has grown darker becomes a barrage of increasingly obvious manipulations involving a book, a pet and dinner served by the maid Nancy. Paula struggles to reconcile what she sees with his explanations, then catches him with a revealing book and the maid. Her attempt to turn his own tactic against him falls flat, while Reese’s commentary keeps drifting back to his own marriage.