On their honeymoon, Gregory says he has envisioned living in London—and “in one of those quiet houses in the little London squares.” Already, the viewer should be suspicious. Most, perhaps, are. This is the first hint that he is not all he appears to be. After first expressing fears of returning to that house in Thornton Square which her late aunt had left her, she shifts gears: “Yes, yes, you shall have your dream. You shall have your house in a square.”
Later, after the couple move into No. 9, the new husband becomes over-protective of his wife’s privacy, to the point of barring neighbors, especially the elderly busybody (endearing Dame May Whitty) Paula had met earlier on a train in Italy, in one of those quixotic, Dickens-like coincidences movie goers and readers of fiction take for granted.
Gregory Anton’s autocratic nature continues, playing upon his wife’s benevolent nature, insisting she ring for the maid (Angela Lansbury in her film début) to add coals to the fire. He even flirts with Nancy in front of Paula. Before long, Paula is losing things and frequently removing a certain painting from the wall. After it disappears several times and he asks her to find the picture, she goes directly to it. “So you knew where it was all the time!” he says. “I only looked there,” she replies innocently, “because that’s where it was found twice before.”
Before long, Paula’s behavior so unnerves Gregory that he proclaims he can’t work in the house—he’s a composer of sorts (“I wish I could write tunes like Strauss.”)—and goes to his studio, always leaving at night, for reasons not explained. About this time, Paula imagines she hears noises from the ceiling and sees the gas lights dim and brighten. When she quizzes the hard of hearing cook Elizabeth (Barbara Everest), the servant honestly says she hears nothing, which only adds to Paula’s anxiety.
Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotton) of Scotland Yard crosses the path of Paula and Gregory during a tour of the Tower of London. Another story coincidence, Cameron had met Alice Alquist when he was a child and, seeing her niece, thinks he’s seeing a ghost. His chief (Edmund Breon) reminds him that Alice’s murderer was never found, nor the jewels he was looking for. His curiosity aroused, Cameron has a policeman Williams (Tom Stevenson) transferred to a Thornton Square beat. Williams reports some strange behavior by Mr. Anton who leaves his house, only to disappear in the fog, reappearing later disheveled and dirty.
Cameron watches the house himself and follows its resident on one of his nightly excursions. Williams approaches from the opposite direction of Gregory’s route and the two meet without either of them seeing him. Williams suggests there’s nothing wrong with a man entering his own house, if that’s what happened to him. “No,” Cameron replies, “but it’s against common sense. Why should a man walk out of his own house, go around the corner just to get back to the place he started from?”
It’s easy to see why Ingrid was nominated and won that Oscar. She has ample opportunity to be worried, apprehensive, distraught and later hysterical as she believes she’s becoming more and more forgetful and continues to misplace and lose things—and those noises and flickering lights! In one of the best of such moments, Gregory accompanies her to a piano recital. During Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor (played by Jakob Gimpel), he whispers to Paula that his pocket watch is missing. Slowly, with the greatest gravity, he takes her purse and extracts the watch. Her desperate cries disturb the audience and Gregory husbandly escorts her out, kindly apologizing to their host.
And Ingrid’s intimate co-star in all her fears and apprehensions is this Victorian house on Thornton Square, with its claustrophobic wall clutter, inexplicably cramped rooms of heavy furniture and low ceilings and chandeliers. Cedric Gibbons and his team won the Oscar for back-and-white Set Direction/Interior Decoration.
One moment in Gaslight seems unavoidable and necessary—at least in Gregory’s scheme. With the recital incident as the perfect pretext, he rages how Paula has embarrassed him, how he’s tried to keep her condition a secret from the outside world, asserts that her mother ended up in an asylum “with no brain at all” and warns Paula that two doctors will soon be making a visit. “I believe two is the required number,” he adds.