Gaslight

Ha! Joseph Cotten is an amazing actor. And I knew it, even before I saw Gaslight last night.

Brief Outline: Ingrid Bergman plays a timid, pretty young girl whose life is blighted by the unsolved murder of her aunt, who was a famous singer. The movie opens with Bergman moving to Italy where she is tutored under the maestro who taught her aunt, and we find her 10 years after the strangling of her aunt, still singing, but distracted. She loves a piantist (Charles Boyer), who is a tall dark, square-jawed fellow with a killer accent and a deep voice. Naturally, they get married and he convinces her to return to the home where she grew up, the home she inherited from her aunt, and the place where her aunt was strangled. But although she would love to have parties and people over, she is too ill to do this or to go anywhere, and on top of it all strange things happen. Such as, she puts things in odd places but doesn't remember doing it, she forgets where things are, she loses things. Or, so her husband tells her. Boyer tells her she is forgetful, that she does strange things, and indeed she seems to be going crazy. Her husband works across town every night to be in a quiet place while he composes. When he is gone, Bergman sees the gaslights go lower, and hears all sorts of footsteps, some shuffling and bumping. She begins to believe she is going mad, especially when her husband tells her her mother (who died when she was born) was crazy and died "alone in an asylum without a brain".
Enter Cotten, who chances to see Bergman and realizes that she is the niece of the famous soprano he met when he was a boy. Bergman seems strange, though, and her husband is even weirder. Cotten happens to work for Scotland Yard and gets going, privately reopening the long forgotten case of the strangled soprano.

Cotten's movies are all good. He's with Orson Welles in The Third Man, and is in a wartime movie Since You Went Away, he's a strange uncle in Shadow of a Doubt, a strange husband in Under Capricorn, a political guy who falls in love with a Swede in The Farmer's Daughter. My favorite is I'll Be Seeing You. I need to see Citizen Kane next, because he's in it, and everyone and their dog has seen it.