1944 – Charles Boyer
Gaslight
I’m going to start this off by saying that I’ve never been a big Charles Boyer fan. For the most part, he always seems to play the same role over and over. He’s the suave French romantic lead. And there are always several things about that role, or at least the way he plays it, that don’t really sit well with me. For one thing, his supposedly charming persona always seems legit on the surface, but I’ve always thought there is a slightly sleezy, slightly bullying, and a little more than slightly predatory edge to him.
But here, all of that works to his favor. Here, he is the bad guy, and those qualities are exactly what are needed to play the part of Gregory Anton. Here, he is able to really lean into that predatory edge and it worked. He played a man who was obsessed with recovering a bunch of valuable old gemstones hidden by an opera singer, so much so, that after he murdered her without being caught, he marries her daughter years later, only to have a second chance at recovering the jewels. But this time, instead of murdering the woman, he slowly drives her insane, making her question her own sense of reality, her own sanity.
Boyer played the villainsous part as cold and calculating, remorseless and relentless, manipulating his snew wife into believing she has strong hallucinations, that she is forgetful or delusional. There was a dark unpredictability about him that made him dangerous. And it was such a departure from the role I’m used to seeing him play that I found myself enjoying his performance. And what made it so great was that he knew how and when to turn on that aggressive charm that he was known for, and when to snap, turning vicious in the blink of an eye. There were several scenes that stood out to me as particularly well done. My favorite is the one where he really looses his cool because his new wife finds an old letter he, himself, had once written to her mother. You can see that he is trying to keep his cool, but when he looses it, he is frightening. Boyer really played it well, and I think he deserved his nomination. Had I been a voter, I might have voted for him instead of Bing Crosby, but that’s just me.