While Angela Lansbury might not have experienced her true career “high” until Murder, She Wrote (and also, well, being the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast), it was her debut role as Nancy in 1944’s Gaslight that established her as a screen actress with plenty of range (as stated in The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, “In a career stretching from ingénue to dowager, from elegant heroine to depraved villainess, [Lansbury] has displayed durability and flexibility, as well as a highly admired work ethic”). For before she was cemented in the public’s eye as some stuffy, sexless old British lady, she portrayed a rather tartish maid with plenty of ripostes against those would accuse her of being tartish. Including the “master” of the house at 9 Thornton Square himself, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer, down to play the villain at a time when Hollywood so loved to openly make “foreigners” villains).
Although the part of Nancy was somewhere elevated above Marilyn Monroe’s appearance as Claudia Casswell in All About Eve and below the appearance of Joseph Cotten himself in Gaslight, Lansbury does wonders with the role. Proving, once again, that there are no small parts, only small actors (see also: Leigh Zimmerman in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York). Indeed, she was reputed for being a “B-actress” for most of her early career (including that less than flattering portrayal as the ultimate frivolous woman in Blue Hawaii) until 1966’s musical production of Mame that managed to assert her position as a gay icon, therefore incontrovertibly “a star.” And, even if Lucille Ball took on the titular part for the 1974 film adaptation, Lansbury secured her proverbial place in the sun by being perennially associated with the role.
One that was a far leap from those scenes in Gaslight, wherein, upon being hired, Nancy is informed by the flagrantly misogynistic Gregory, “Your mistress is inclined to be rather highly strung.” And, pointedly, these types of belittling statements rearing their ugly heads just as the war was set to end, and women were to be forced back into their “proper station,” feel well-timed to the 1944 release of the movie. Setting the stage to make others believe she’s “fragile” and “insane,” the “mistress” in question is Paula (Ingrid Bergman), the long-tormented niece of famed opera singer Alice Alquist. A woman who was mysteriously strangled in her own home when Paula was just a young girl of fourteen (though, of course, ten years later, she looks exactly the same—‘cause that’s Hollywood).
Subsequently sent to Italy to get away from the trauma epicenter of Thornton Square and study under Alice’s own mentor, Maestro Guardi (Emil Rameau), a decade passes until Paula admits to the maestro that she 1) doesn’t have the same talent as her aunt and 2) that she’s in love. The object of her affection being the very pianist that Guardi has employed to play the music for their sessions. Paula hears a different tune altogether during them, one that misleads her into believing that Gregory’s love and intentions are pure when, in fact, they’re all carefully-crafted machinations orchestrated to complete a long game. One that involves making her think she’s delusional so as to access her estate as freely as he wishes to once he has her committed.
Both Nancy and Elizabeth (Barbara Everest), the slightly deaf cook, are unwitting tools of the plan. After all, asking a half-deaf person if they’ve heard anything strange isn’t exactly going to help Paula’s need for corroboration, which is why it was all by Gregory’s design to hire someone with such a condition in the first place. Plus, with a “loose” girl like Nancy preferring to take the side of a handsome bloke over his seemingly frigid wife and a woman who can barely hear, all the tricks Gregory wishes to use to make Paula believe she’s going mad will be highly effective. Even if, as far as the maids can initially tell, Paula appears to be just fine, with Nancy asking Elizabeth at the outset, “What’s the matter with the mistress? She don’t look ill to me. Is she?” Elizabeth replies, forebodingly, “I don’t know. Not as I can see. The master keeps telling her she is.” Ergo, this film being the very genesis of the term “gaslighting”—which is only appropriate considering the script was written by three men (John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston—perhaps offset by the film being helmed by “women’s director” George Cukor).
To that point, Gregory pulls out all the classic stops of how men manipulate women for their own foul ends—usually to maintain a power imbalance in their favor. This includes saying such derisive, “write-off-genuine-emotions-as-‘overreactions’” things as, “Paula, please stop being hysterical.” But anyone would be, if she were made to believe she was a kleptomaniac. Something Gregory is able to convince her of throughout the film as he tears at the very fabric of her already vulnerable self-assurance. This tearing being done so effectively because he’s able to isolate her from the outside world, convincing her to return to the house at Thornton Square that she avoided for so long on purpose.
For months afterward, Gregory needles her into thinking she’s too delicate to get out much or receive visitors like their nosy neighbor, Miss Thwaites (Dame May Whitty). And even when Paula does manage to claw her way out of the house to get them to an event at Lady Dalroy’s (Heather Thatcher), he’s sure to point out during the “Seratsky” performance that his watch is missing, then pilfers through her bag and “finds” it there (where he planted it, because he’s a fucking asshole).
Through it all, Nancy observes the bizarre goings-on of the household, often involving Paula asking if she’s lit the gas somewhere else in the house to cause them to dim downstairs (which actually occurs because Gregory goes into the attic in secret to search for Alice’s royal jewels—the very jewels he murdered her over—turning on the light and thereby diminishing the gas level in the lamps below). While some might call the looks that Nancy flashes to be ones of coquetry, it’s clear that even she suspects something is a bit off (and it ain’t the lights). Regardless of her own internalized sense of misogyny prompting her to side with the man (something Lansbury herself did in written form post-#MeToo), it seems clear that she knows Gregory is up to no good. Yet that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still want to be involved in aiding him somehow.
With no assistance from her fellow women in the household, who Gregory has deliberately pitted against their “mistress,” there comes a moment when Paula must finally ask point-blank, “Gregory, are you trying to tell me I’m insane?” He retorts, “That’s what I’m trying not to tell myself.” She further demands, “But that’s what you think, isn’t it?” And that’s what the mistrustful Nancy is convinced of as well. For it suits her purpose of wanting the “rich” (through no fortune of his own) master all to herself.
When Paula is finally given the relief of being told by Inspector Brian Cameron (Cotten), “You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind,” it’s as though the proverbial hallelujah chorus starts to play. Nonetheless, despite the sense of comfort the audience feels as a result of her recognizing that Gregory has been to blame all along, one can’t help but still wonder what might become of Nancy after all this.
To be sure, so standout was Lansbury’s ostensibly “nominal” role that she not only got a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars, but also a callout in The New York Times via the side note, “Nice little personality vignettes are interestingly contributed, too, by Joseph Cotten as a stubborn detective, Dame May Whitty and Angela Lansbury as a maid.” Dame May Whitty is, ironically, the type of more than slightly annoying busybody Lansbury would end up portraying later on in life.
