The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that particular usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a stage thriller about a husband who surreptitiously rearranges things in the house so as to make his wife believe that she’s gone insane. Gas Light proved enough of a hit to be adapted for the cinema two years later, with the two words of its title streamlined into one. You can watch Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight just above, and if you enjoy it, have a look at the rest of the more than 70 literary movies collected into this playlist from the verified YouTube channel Cult Cinema Classics.
If you know your cinema history, you’ll know that Gaslight was remade in Hollywood in 1944, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Angela Lansbury. (That version inspired Steely Dan’s song “Gaslighting Abbie,” where I first heard the word myself.)
In those days, the American film industry looked to the British one for proven material — material the British film industry, for its part, had found in literature. Take the work of a rising young director called Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted Charles Bennett’s Blackmail in 1929, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1935, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as Sabotage in 1936, and Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn in 1939.
Today, literary adaptation seems to have become a relatively niche practice in Hollywood, but in the mid-twentieth century, it had real cachet: hence the increasing ambition of productions like The Scarlet Letter (1934), Of Mice and Men 1939, Fleischer Studios’ animated Gulliver’s Travels (1939), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and Jane Eyre (1970). Naturally, these films reflect their own eras as much as they do the authorial visions of Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Swift, Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë. Each of these pictures offers its own way of regarding its source material. And would it seem so insane to believe that some of them may even have influence still to exert on popular culture here in the twenty-first century? Watch the playlist of 70 literary films here.
Related content:
The First-Ever Film Version of Lewis Carroll’s Tale Alice in Wonderland (1903)
Watch the Trailer for the Long-Lost First Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926)
When François Truffaut Made a Film Adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Watch the Hugely-Ambitious Soviet Film Adaptation of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)
Watch an 8‑Part Film Adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Free Online
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.