For its part, MGM undertook to gaslight audiences by pretending that the British movie never existed. The studio tried to destroy all prints; that the first “Gaslight” survived at all may be credited to the director Thorold Dickinson’s foresight in making a personal copy.

Like the movie’s horrible husband, MGM had a reason. Bergman’s bravura performance aside, the Dickinson film is superior to the Hollywood version in nearly every way: more economical (running half an hour shorter), more brutal (opening with the murder of an elderly woman and the killer ransacking her flat), and a lot nastier. Walbrook malevolently lords over his pathetic wife (Diana Wynyard). Unctuously pious, he’s clearly unhinged as well as openly predatory in making the housemaid his mistress. (Cathleen Cordell is a lot tawdrier than Lansbury as well.) There’s a terrific bit of business where the pair go off to the music hall to catch some French cancan dancers.

More than a tough little thriller, the 1940 “Gaslight” is a sardonic portrait of a bad marriage between a couple that turns out to not even be married. Still, when the film finally made its tardy way to the United States in 1952, Crowther found it inferior to the Cukor version: “The street sets are plainly artificial, the atmosphere seems laboriously contrived and the direction of Thorold Dickinson is perceptibly casual and slow.”

By then, the plot became overly familiar. In addition to Hitchcock’s two kindred gothics, other versions of this female noir included Joseph H. Lewis’s “My Name is Julia Ross” (1945), Vincente Minnelli’s “Undercurrent” (1946) and two Anatole Litvak 1948 melodramas, the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle “Sorry Wrong Number” and Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit.” “Gaslight” was dramatized on the radio and satirized on TV. By the time Robert Aldrich made “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964) in which Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland conspire to undermine Bette Davis’s sanity, the verb “to gaslight” had made its way into both popular culture (used in sitcoms as early as 1952) and psychoanalytic discourse.

Maureen Dowd may have been the first to apply the “gaslight” to politics. Her 1995 op-ed piece, “The Gaslight Strategy” playfully described the Clinton administration’s attempt to provoke the speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich, into making irrational outbursts. In Gingrich’s case, she thought such a scheme was unnecessary: “You can’t Gaslight someone who is already a little lit.” True or not, we’ll see if this term, so commonly used in the last presidential election, continues to have relevance in the next.

The 1944 version of “Gaslight” can be streamed via Amazon Prime, Vudu and YouTube; the 1940 version is available from Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Vudu.