In this gimmicky version of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled novel Lady in the Lake, Marlowe is hired by grasping, social climbing editor Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) to find the missing wife of her boss Derace Kingsby (Leon Ames). Kingsby's wife has supposedly high-tailed it to Mexico. But then a woman's body turns up in Lake Arrowhead and the crooked cops are all over Marlowe as other corpses begin to pile up.
Montgomery, taking his cue from Dark Passage, a Bogart film in which the first half-hour is filmed subjectively from Bogie's point-of-view, fashions the entire Lady in the Lake around the subjective camera. The camera shoots from Marlowe's perspective as he investigates crime scenes, interviews witnesses, gets punched in the face, and receives a big, wet kiss. Ostensibly the star, Montgomery only surfaces periodically in the film through reflections in mirrors. Most of the time, with the camera being Montgomery, all we get of a Marlowe character is occasional puffs of smoking wafting into frame from below or arms suddenly emerging from off-camera to punch a face, grasping dirt, or being held out to be cuffed.
The problem is we have no idea what this character is feeling or thinking except for the nasty lines of dialogue that Montgomery spits at his supporting actors, making Montgomery's Marlowe the most distasteful and unsympathetic of all screen Marlowes. Instead, the viewer of Lady in the Lake feels trapped inside a stifling and uncontrollable Doom video game.
To be sure, hopes are high at the beginning. The credits appear on festival Christmas holiday cards as a spritely chorus sings Christmas carols. Until the final card, which is taken away to reveal a gun. And there are a few exciting and immediate sequences -- the search of a soon-to-be-found murder victims' home, a car chase down a dark, deserted road.
At one point a character addresses Marlowe and asks him, 'May I speak to you?' Marlowe replies, 'Why not? Everybody's speaking to me.' And that is what makes the film so deadly. Montgomery offers up a radical technique but deploys it in the most, boring and prosaic way. Actors stare blankly into the camera lens and when they are addressed they overdo it as if at an extended screen test.
Audrey Totter has the worst of it. As Adrienne Fromsett, Totter has the one character in the film with any kind a character arc. But in playing to nothing she has to register mood shifts to convey character development. Totter tries and fails at a lost cause and comes across as nothing so much as a Class A schizophrenic.
Montgomery completely misinterprets the joys of film noir. It is not the plot or the who-killed-who mystery that made the genre successful. It is the style and the psychological interactions between the characters, and this main ingredient is what is missing from Lady in the Lake. Like one of those old stereo demo records, this film is Noir Minus One.
The DVD features commentary by film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini and also the theatrical trailer.
Aka The Lady in the Lake.
Buggin' out.
