00:09welcome back to tcm celebration of the 90th anniversary of the bfi national archive
00:15i'm alicia malone as we've been hearing about tonight the archive was established in 1935
00:21and is now one of the world's largest film and television collections and it's not just british
00:27cinema they have more than 25 000 american film and television works plus countless posters
00:34storyboards scripts and more the bfi do important work in film preservation and crucially they are
00:41focused on making the movies in the archive available to screen across the world next we
00:47have a british film that is part of the collection and one we don't watch too often on tcm it's
00:52the
00:521940 version of gaslight directed by thorold dickinson the original material was a stage
00:59play by patrick hamilton that had opened just outside of london to great success in 1938
01:04moving to london's west end the following year a radio version was quickly put into production
01:10with british national buying the rights to a film version and hiring thorold dickinson to direct
01:16dickinson usually liked to keep his films loose and improvised but for this project he and editor
01:23sydney cole planned out every shot in advance he also decided to shoot in order with production
01:30designer duncan sutherland given the task of designing sets that allowed dickinson to film from any angle
01:36anton volbrook and diana wynyard were cast as a newly married couple paul and bella who move into a
01:44house formerly occupied by a woman who was murdered and soon bella starts to lose objects and see
01:50things with her husband making her question her own sanity volbrook was reportedly dubious about
01:57dickinson's shooting methods but soon warmed up because dickinson's way meant that the actors could see
02:03a rough cut as they were filming volbrook had a reputation for being difficult but dickinson didn't
02:09really experience that saying he was very generous and got on extremely well once he got his faith
02:15restored digitally remastered by the bfi national archive in 2013 this is the 1940 version of gaslight
02:24you
