“I’m afraid I enjoy a good murder now and then.”

Ingrid Bergman won her first of three Academy Awards for her role in George Cukor’s paranoid thriller Gaslight. She plays the fragile Paula Alquist, the niece of a world famous opera singer who was strangled to death for her prized jewel collection. A young girl at the time, Paula was living with her aunt when the murder occurred and still suffers from memories of the traumatic event. Now an adult, Paula forsakes her own singing career to return to the inherited London townhouse with her new lover, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), who fosters a strange aspiration to live in just such an abode. Though initially a suave romantic who sweeps the vulnerable Paula off her feet, Anton gradually transforms into a fiendish manipulator who mentally abuses his wife. His most diabolical trick? Convincing his insecure bride that her own mind is playing tricks on her—that she does things she can’t remember, that she sees and hears things that are not there.

Though the term derived from the film’s title has come to represent a type of psychological manipulation motivated by a desire to have other abuses brushed under the rug, Anton has ulterior motives that are never all that mysterious. Indeed, though Gaslight takes on some aspects of a noir—eventually it is Joseph Cotten’s police inspector, who was infatuated with Paula’s aunt as a young boy, who solves the puzzle; and of course the detailed mise en scène, lighting, fog, etc.—it is its rich psychological detail, embodied in Bergman’s mesmerizing performance, that provides the film its substance. And though it escapes its stagebound roots (it’s based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, which had already been adapted once in 1940 by Thorold Dickinson) and expands the supporting roles of the servants (Angela Lansbury, Barbara Everest) and the nosy neighbor (Dame May Whitty), the film is truly a two-hander between Bergman’s harried victim and Boyer’s debonair abuser.