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1. The term "gaslight." The Ingrid Bergman thriller "Gaslight" -- released 70 years ago this week, on May 4, 1944, wasn't the original use of the title. There was Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play "Gas Light," retitled "Angel Street" when it came to Broadway a couple years later. And there was a British film version in 1939, starring Anton Walbrook (later the cruel impresario in "The Red Shoes") and Diana Wynyard.

Still, the glossy 1944 MGM version remains the best-known telling of the tale, with the title an apparent reference to the flickering Victorian lamps that are part of Gregory's (Charles Boyer) scheme to make wife Paula (Bergman) think she's seeing things that aren't there, thus deliberately undermining her sanity in order to have her institutionalized so that he'll be free to ransack the ancestral home to find the missing family jewels.

This version of Hamilton's tale was so popular that it made the word "gaslight"into a verb,...

Ann Blyth is Turner Classic Movies Star of the Evening tonight, as part of TCM's "The Essentials" film series. [Ann Blyth Movie Schedule.] Opera- and Broadway-trained Ann Blyth began her film career in the mid-1940s at Universal, appearing in light B musicals opposite Donald O'Connor and/or Peggy Ryan, among them The Merry Monahans, Chip Off the Old Block, and Babes on Swing Street. Blyth's big break came in 1945, when — following back surgery — she played Joan Crawford's pathologically selfish daughter Veda in Michael Curtiz's classic film noir-cum-melodrama Mildred Pierce. A well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination followed, and so did leads in darker, bigger-budgeted productions, among them Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), with Burt Lancaster; Zoltan Korda's A Woman's Vengeance (1948), opposite Charles Boyer; and Michael Gordon's film version of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel to The Little Foxes. Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing any of Blyth's hard-to-find Universal titles.