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It all starts out as a perfectly normal late afternoon for Jack (Joseph
Meinrad) and Bella (Erika Pluhar), she orders tea and waffles, he promises
to take her out to the theatre in the next couple of days, and she
couldn't be happier about it - and then he notices a painting missing from
the wall. And it's not that the painting's any valuable, and it's also
quickly found, but Jack's convinced Bella has taken it down in a fit of
lucacy, something she seems to be prone of. Enraged, Jack leaves the house
- and only moments later, a stranger, Rough (Gustav Knuth), a retired
police detective as it turns out, enters and tries to convince Bella,
who's close to a nervous breakdown, is not in fact insane but subject to
her husbands suggestive trickery - apparently he wants to have her locked
away in an insane asylum, and quickly, too. Rough learns that every time
Jack goes out, he somehow sneaks back to the building's most upper floor
which he has closed off from everyone else, to search for something,
something that Bella's alerted by the dimming of the gaslight all over the
house. Rough tells her of a gruesome murder that has happened in the house
20 years ago. Now the victim was known to own some very valuable rubies
that went missing after the murder, but evidence suggests that the
murderer, while searching the house, hasn't found them - so it's more
likely than not that Jack is indeed the murderer from all those years
back, who has returned to search for the rubies. Rough breaks open Jack's
desk and finds a brooch that it turns out belonged to the victim all those
years back and that he has later given to Bella, and in a secret
compartment inside the brooch the rubies - so Jack had them all along
without knowing it ... When Jack returns, Bella uses his own trickery
against him to convince him he's insane. Not that it works or she expects
it to work, but it annoys him enough to have a fit of rage - and
fortunately Rough arrives with a couple of police officers just in time to
prevent the worst ... Now Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight is
quite a fascinating play in its own right, and has been the source
material for more than one great movie, and since this TV movie sticks
very close to the play, it has that going for it ... and going against it,
really, as as good as the play might be, it was intended for the stage and
not the screen, and what works on stage doesn't necessarily translate well
to the small screen - which is to say this movie's rather on the stagey
side and really lacks the scope one would expect from a dynamic medium
like television. Thing is, with this reduction of simply restaging the
play in front of a camera, the play's shortcomings - owed to its theatre
origin of course, an in some cases more forgiving medium - come to the
fore. Thing is, the film's theatre roots even bleed into the acting: While
the cast is fine, and well cast, really, their performances are too big
for the small screen, lack the naturalness one has come to expect from
television, but would have perfectly befitted the theatre stage. That
all said, this is by no means a shipwreck, just a movie that never lives
up to its full potential, and that also for the late 1970s feels a tad
old-fashioned in its filmed-theatre approach.
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