The glossy Hollywood version of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight (there had been a British version directed by Thorold Dickinson just four years earlier) benefits from considerable star power, the most beautiful sets and photography that MGM could buy and first rate direction from George Cukor but doesn’t stay particularly true to the source. Nor is it as creepily effective as Dickinson’s version though it’s still a chilling psychological horror film whose title – more so than the play or the earlier films – has become a byword for cruelty and emotional manipulation.  It was one of a series of films – among them Rebecca (1940), the aptly titled Suspicion (1941), Dragonwyck (1945), Notorious (1946) and The Spiral Staircase (1946) among others in which a vulnerable women is manipulated or menaced by the husband or man she loves who she comes to realises that she barely knows.

Fourteen-year-old Paula Alquist (Terry Moore, later in Mighty Joe Young (1949)) witnesses the brutal murder of her famous opera singer aunt Alice Alquist in their home at 9 Thornton Square in London by a burglar who was apparently trying, unsuccessfully, to make off with the woman’s jewellery. Paula is sent to Italy to train as an opera singer and years later (now played by Ingrid Bergman) meets and marries the seemingly charming Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer). He insists that they make their home at 9 Thornton Square (at which point alarm bells should have been ringing for both Paula and the audience). Once they’ve settled in, Gregory’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and violent as Paula seems to be suffering some unexplained mental illness, her memory failing and her nights haunted by mysterious footsteps coming from a sealed attic. Becoming increasingly isolated by Gregory, Paula starts to suspect that her servants, particularly new maid Nancy (Angela Lansbury), are conspiring against her though help isn’t far away in the shape of Scotland Yard Inspector Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten), an admirer of Alice Alquist since childhood – but will he be able to get to the bottom of the mystery before it’s too late for Paula?

Today the word “gaslighting” has been used since the 1960s to describe the behaviour of some men who try to manipulate the beliefs and fears of their partners in an attempt to control or coerce them, playing cruel games with memory and sowing self-doubt and despair in their victims. The term originates as much here as it does the play, which isn’t performed as much today as one would hope, or the 1940 film which again gets fewer outings than this more famous Oscar winner.

That gong went to Bergman for her terrific performance as the much-harried Paula and it was well deserved though she tends to slip into more melodramatic mode for the overwrought final moments. But she was rarely as good again as she is here – her breakdown at a piano recital when screen husband Charles Boyer makes a huge deal out of a missing watch that he himself had removed earlier is almost painful to watch. Boyer himself, cast against type, is excellent too, at first charming later twitchy as his mask begins to slip and finally revealed as nothing more than a low-life criminal thug with a penchant for mental torture. Gregory’s abuse of Paula is patient and insidious, sadistic in the levels of pleasure he seems to take in not just controlling her but utterly humiliating her.

And then there’s Angela Lansbury, just 18 at the time and bagging an Oscar nomination for her first screen outing as the Anton’s Cockney maid who Paula also comes to suspect is up to no good, a lovely turn from Dame May Whitty as a nosy neighbour and Joseph Cotton, who’s as good as ever as the cop who inevitably saves the day. The cast and well served not only by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston’s screenplay and Cukor’s snappy direction but by Joseph Ruttenberg’s moody photography. He shoots it as much as a period noir than as a psychological horror film, the flickering gas powered lighting that gives the film its title used to eerie effect throughout.

Gaslight isn’t as chilling as the 1940 British adaptation, which featured an unnervingly nasty turn from Anton Walbrook as the manipulative husband (the character is named differently in the play and in each version of the film) tormenting Diana Wynard. When MGM decided to adapt the play, which had played on Broadway for an extraordinary 1,295 performances under the new title of Angel Street and with Vincent Price and Judith Evelyn in the main roles, they brought the rights to Dickinson’s film and try to suppress it by ordering the destruction of all prints. They even went after the negatives, but Dickinson held on to a copy for his personal use ensuring that it remained available for future generations. It’s not hard to see why MGM were so jumpy about the rival production. Cukor’s film is outstanding, the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s at the peak of its powers, but it’s Dickinson’s smaller scale film that chills the most, thanks in no small part to Walbrook’s disturbing performance.

It’s the 1944 film that still remains the most famous manifestation of the story – the Dickinson version survived but was harder to find for many years. And while it doesn’t quite unsettle the way the earlier film did it’s still a magnificent achievement, as powerful and persuasive a depiction of domestic psychological torture as has ever been filmed. The performances help as does the gorgeous photography but it’s Cukor’s marshalling of these elements that impresses the most. The steadily mounting atmosphere of dread and mistrust (is the house haunted? Is Paula being stalked by a killer? Is any of this actually happening at all? Even we begin to doubt her sanity after a while), the claustrophobic setting of the lushly appointed London house and the unbearable suspense – it gives contemporary Hitchcock a good run for his money – all carried off with effortless style by Cukor who was at the top of his game here.

Although Gaslight hasn’t been filmed again there have been television adaptations (NBC made one in 1946 though the earliest, featuring the original London stage cast of Dennis Arundell, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Milton Rosmer, Beatrice Rowe and Elizabeth Inglis, had been broadcast live on the BBC as early as 1939 and Australian and Polish small screen versions followed in 1958 and 1961 respectively) and versions for radio, and the play is intermittently revived around the world.