Divorce in Australia was not easily obtained in the nineteenth century, so he figures he will just abandon his wife, change his name to Paul Mallen, and marry a rich woman in England while still having that wife in Australia.
He can’t afford to buy or even lease the Barlow house, so he decides that he should return to England, marry a rich woman, use her money to buy the house, move into it, and resume his search for the rubies. For the next two decades, he remains there with his wife, until one day, we can only suppose, he gets to thinking about those rubies he could never find. Again, he is not a suspect, and he is not a criminal as far as the police are concerned, so this move to Australia is completely unmotivated.īut he does move to Australia and get married. With no fear of being interrupted, he could have leisurely searched the place whenever he wanted to and as often as he liked. Inasmuch as the house has remained unoccupied for twenty years, he could have stayed in London and, after things calmed down a bit, break in and look for the rubies again.
So, he emigrates to Australia and gets married. Presumably, then, Bauer was not the heir to the Barlow estate. Therefore, it would seem that all Bauer had to do was inherit the house and then resume his search for the rubies, as a bachelor, unencumbered by a wife. Prior to the murder, Bauer was not a criminal, and the police never suspected him of that murder. In the absence of any reference to this woman having had children, Bauer would seem to be the most likely heir. I belabor this point because the man that murdered Alice Barlow was her nephew, Louis Bauer. There is a sign in front of the house indicating the agent that is in charge of leasing the property for the estate, but no reference to an owner. In fact, twenty years later, the house seems to be not only unoccupied, but unowned.
#Gaslight 1940 movie
Nor is there a word in the movie explaining this, such as a reference to relatives, possibly children of the Barlows, contending with each other in court for possession of the house, belongings of the deceased, or even what she might have had in the bank. Now, I realize that probate can sometimes take a while, but twenty years is a bit much, even for the estate of someone that is rich. After the murder, twenty years pass, with the house at 12 Pimlico Square still sitting there, complete with all the furniture and other possessions of Alice Barlow. The first thing that bothered me was that no one seems to have received the Barlow estate through inheritance. Therefore, by pulling together bits and pieces gathered from different points in the movie, I shall try to make clear my misgivings. As I watched this movie, I was perplexed at certain points, and even after seeing the entire thing twice, I found that much of it did not make sense. And while that is a suitable method for summarizing most movies, perhaps the only one that makes sense in certain cases, with other movies there may be a benefit in reconstructing the events and their meaning, which can be grasped only after the fact. Converted to dollars, and adjusted for inflation, they would be worth about $1,500,000 today in America.Īt this point, we could follow the events as they unfold in the movie. The newspaper informs us that the murderer got away with the Barlow rubies, worth £12,000. He apparently has to give up and leave, for in the next scene, the maid is coming out of the door, screaming for the police, having just arrived around seven in the morning.
Then he really becomes desperate and starts ripping open the furniture cushions. It is late at night, and for over five hours, he ransacks the place. A man sneaks up behind her and strangles her with a skein of worsted picked up off the table next to her. The 1940 version of Gaslight begins with Alice Barlow, an elderly widow, working on a piece of embroidery, on which she has stitched the date, 1865. Now that the week does not go by that someone does not use that word, I decided to watch both movies again. But that was before the term “gaslighting” had become a part of our vocabulary. A long time ago, I saw the 1944 version of Gaslight, and then, some years later, I saw the 1940 version.
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