The film noir that exposed the every­day hor­rors of domes­tic violence

Pret­ty much all film noirs fea­ture crime – and not just any crime, but the kind of big scale, head­line-grab­bing offence that can get you locked up for a very long time. The allure of ambi­tious finan­cial scams, for instance, dri­ve the crim­i­nals in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and The Mal­tese Fal­con, while The Asphalt Jun­gle and Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Killing cen­tre around metic­u­lous heists. And peo­ple are always turn­ing up mur­dered, whether through domes­tic crimes of pas­sion as in the likes of Out of the Past and Lau­ra, or as part of a wider crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tion as in The Third Man and Touch of Evil.

But these types of Class A felonies are not essen­tial to the film noir genre. In fact, that genre doesn’t real­ly exist at all, in the sense that no film was pro­duced as a ​‘film noir’ – rather, that label was ret­ro­spec­tive­ly assigned to a vari­ety of films shar­ing sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics we’ve come to recog­nise as ​‘noirish’.

Take 1944’s Gaslight, direct­ed by George Cukor and star­ring Charles Boy­er and Ingrid Bergman. Its low key light­ing and brood­ing music are clas­sic exam­ples of noir iconog­ra­phy, and con­jures a tense, threat­en­ing atmos­phere that per­sis­tent­ly implies some­thing is amiss. But the mis­deeds and mal­prac­tice that occu­pies the rot­ten core of the sto­ry is not of the famil­iar kind list­ed above, but instead of a more every­day offence that is com­pli­cat­ed to present, and one that could nev­er be mis­per­ceived as glam­orous – that of domes­tic abuse.

Hus­bands abus­ing their wives was not a sub­ject often addressed in clas­sic Hol­ly­wood, and cer­tain­ly not in film noirs, where women were typ­i­cal­ly writ­ten as femme fatales who them­selves do most of the manip­u­lat­ing. And nei­ther does it seem intu­itive that such a nuanced sub­ject would be well suit­ed to the form’s typ­i­cal­ly melo­dra­mat­ic and often over­wrought style.

But in Gaslight, Cukor – who has a record of female-ori­ent­ed films, from Katharine Hepburn’s turn as a lawyer inter­est­ed in equal rights for women in Adam’s Rib to Judy Garland’s rise to fame in A Star Is Born – does a sur­pris­ing­ly good job of drama­tis­ing the sub­ject in a painful­ly believ­able man­ner. None of the abuse is pre­sent­ed in sen­sa­tion­al­ist terms, with Charles Boyer’s char­ac­ter Gre­go­ry nev­er explic­it­ly hit­ting Bergman’s Paula, but instead doc­u­ments the more sub­tle, dif­fi­cult ter­ri­to­ry of emo­tion­al abuse.

The visu­al lan­guage of the film imme­di­ate­ly instructs us not to trust Gre­go­ry. Though it’s only lat­er in the film that his true motive – to get his hands on some price­less jew­els – is revealed, we’re prompt­ed to treat him with sus­pi­cion from the get go. In his very first appear­ance on screen he’s framed behind a fence which obscures him as he calls out to Paula, as though he has some­thing to hide. Soon after, as Paula alights a train at Lake Como, where she plans to mull over his mar­riage pro­pos­al, a hand sin­is­ter­ly enters from the side of frame and grabs her wrist. It turns out to belong to Gre­go­ry, who has turned up unin­vit­ed. Paula may in spite of her­self be pleased to see him, but we’re already on high alert.

It’s only when Paula has accept­ed his offer of mar­riage and the pair move in togeth­er in her inher­it­ed house in Lon­don that Gre­go­ry begins to manip­u­late and sub­tly take con­trol of her. He begins by accus­ing her of absent-mind­ed­ness in a casu­al, affa­ble man­ner, pur­pose­ful­ly dam­ag­ing her sense of self-trust so that, when he takes and hide objects from her, she starts to doubt her own san­i­ty. He then estab­lish­es him­self as a stern, pater­nal fig­ure, iso­lat­ing her from the out­side world and using her appar­ent health prob­lems relat­ing to all the mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­pear­ing objects to per­suade her to spend all her time indoors and in bed. In one par­tic­u­lar­ly excru­ci­at­ing scene when she per­suades him to let her leave the house to see a friend’s recital, he accus­ing­ly informs her upon arrival that his ​‘watch is gone’, prompt­ing her to cry out and flee the room in distress.

After that low, how­ev­er, she is helped out of her dire sit­u­a­tion by Joseph Cotton’s friend­ly neigh­bour Bri­an, who as an exter­nal fig­ure that man­ages to force his way into the house is able to expose the web of illu­sions Gre­go­ry has sur­round­ed her with. Then in a cathar­tic, cli­mac­tic scene, Paula is final­ly able to con­front her abuser and lib­er­ates her­self from his psy­cho­log­i­cal prison.

Her descent into this prison and the emo­tion­al stran­gle­hold of her abuser is grad­ual and always feels ground­ed in the way a vic­tim could gen­uine­ly behave, giv­ing the film a sense of psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism despite the genre’s man­ner­isms. Boy­er and Bergman’s per­for­mances are excep­tion­al in the way they bring to life an abu­sive rela­tion­ship, with the lat­ter being award­ed the Oscar in 1945. As far as film noir goes, few can claim to be as true to the kind of hor­ri­fy­ing, every­day crimes that go on behind closed doors.