Unaffected by the screen-rights situation in America, British National produced their own Gaslight movie in 1940, before anyone at Columbia had done anything more than throw ideas around. Columbia swiftly acquired the rights to mount a film version, but that studio’s leadership dawdled for long enough that a thicket of complications sprang up around them. When it reached Broadway, for example, it ended up staying for nearly three years. When the British stage play Gaslight was brought to the United States under the title Angel Street early in 1939, it was a big and long-lasting money-maker. In fact, one of the most highly respected American suspense movies of the 1940’s was remade from an English film that was released only four years previously, and the process that led to its existence involved behavior so underhanded on the part of the studio heads that it might actually prove illegal to attempt comparable chicanery today. But while it may be true that there’s more of that sort of thing going on today than was the case in the past, the practice itself is much older than is generally recognized. Most conspicuously, there has been the recent trend for remaking buzz-generating Asian horror films rather than simply dubbing and importing the originals The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water are all high-profile examples. Gaslight/Murder on Thornton Square (1944) ***½Īs any dimly perceptive observer will surely have noticed, the past few years have seen a considerable number of Hollywood movies that are remakes of successful foreign films, many of them only a few years old.
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