Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

newspaper personal advertisements. Sandra is asked by the police to answer these
newspapers advertisements in the personal columns so as to lure the killer into a trap.
Another unconventional period thriller, which was adapted from a 1939 book by Patrick
Hamilton, is George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), aka The Murder in Thornton Square. The
film opens just after world-famous opera singer and entertainer Alice Alquist has been
strangled, at number 9 Thornton Square in London. The intention of the killer was to get
hold of her jewels, but Paula (Ingrid Bergman), Alice’s niece, manages to intercept him.
Paula was raised by her aunt after her mother’s death, and is then sent to Italy so that she
can study music to be an opera star. She studies with the same teacher who once trained
her aunt, and stays with him for years trying to forget that terrible night. She then decides
to get married to older pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer, playing against type), who
convinces her to move back to the old address in London, a house long uninhabited, to
overcome her anxieties. She quickly finds herself misplacing small objects
Figure 96. Gaslight
or fiddling with the gaslights which makes the rest of the lamps in the house dim slightly,
as fig. 96 above shows. The ominous interpretation of the change in light levels becomes
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