Customer Reviews

Lady in the Lake [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Drawing on his life of crimefighting to write a short story, Raymond Chandler's tough but noble P.I. Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery, pulling double duty as actor and director) submits his work to Kingsby Publications, home of such pulp fiction mags as LURID DETECTIVE and MURDER MASTERPIECES. Before he can say "byline," editor Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) has Marlowe up to his neck in murder, missing dames, and crooked cops -- and you can see things Marlowe's way, literally! Before all those slasher movies came along during the last couple of decades, LADY IN THE LAKE used the subjective camera treatment -- hell, the camera was practically a character in the flick! Throughout most of LADY..., we see everything exactly as Marlowe sees it; the only times we see Marlowe/Montgomery's face is when he looks in a mirror, as well as in a brief prologue, an entrè-acte segment, and an epilogue. In the trailer (featured on the spiffy new DVD version of LADY..., along with an enjoyable and informative commentary track by film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini), MGM's publicity department did its best to push the film as the first interactive movie experience: "MGM presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together! YOU accept an invitation to a blonde's apartment! YOU get socked in the jaw by a murder suspect!" YOU occasionally start snickering in spite of yourself when the subjective camera gimmick teeters dangerously close to parodying itself, like when Totter moves in for a smooch with Our Hero The Camera. Some of Totter's facial expressions in the first half of the film as she spars verbally with Montgomery are pretty funny, too, though I'm not sure all of them were meant to be (she uses the arched eyebrow technique done so much more effectively later by CQ's Angela Lindvall, Eunice Gayson of DR. NO and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, Leonard Nimoy, The Rock, et al... :-). Having said that, the subjective camera technique works more often than not; in particular, I thought the fight scenes and a harrowing sequence where an injured Marlowe crawls out of his wrecked car worked beautifully. It helps that Steve Fisher provided a good solid screenplay for Raymond Chandler's novel, though Chandler purists were annoyed that the novel's pivotal Little Fawn Lake sequence was relegated to a speech in the recap scene in the middle (apparently they tried to film that scene on location, but the subjective camera treatment proved harder to do in the great outdoors, so they gave up). The performances are quite good overall, including Lloyd Nolan as a dirty cop and an intense dramatic turn by young Jayne Meadows. Montgomery's sardonic snap mostly works well for cynical Marlowe, though he sometimes forgets to tone it down during tender dialogue, making him sound simply cranky. Totter eventually tones down her mugging and becomes genuinely affecting as her Adrienne lets down her guard and begins falling for Marlowe. You may love or hate this LADY..., but if you enjoy mysteries and you're intrigued by offbeat movie-making techniques, give her a try!

What a movie!GreatB/W movie that is completely shot out of the eyes of the main character Phillip Marlowe. It's about a P.I who is hired to find a missing person. The one-liners and facial expressions are hilarious. I was rolling on the floor. A must see!

"Lady in the Lake" is something of an experiment in subjective camera by actor/director Robert Montgomery. Somehow I doubt that's what MGM had in mind for a crime film based on Raymond Chandler's novel of the same name, Chandler being one of the most popular crime writers in America at the time. We rarely see the leading man's face. We never know much about him. The camera work is constrained by always seeing from one viewpoint. All because the camera has taken a subjective point of view, that of private detective Philip Marlowe. While this technique did present its own set of interesting challenges, not the least of which were extremely long takes and actors always playing to the camera, the subjective camera ends up being an impediment in engaging the audience visually or emotionally. It effectively takes Philip Marlowe out of the picture, leaving him a disembodied voice whose character we never know or care much about. Raymond Chandler's material should have made good film noir, but "Lady in the Lake" lacks captivating lead roles and anything interesting to look at.

Private detective Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) has turned from the mean streets to the typewriter. He has submitted a detective story to Kingsby Publications, publishers of "lurid detective stories" among other pulp fiction. At the publisher's offices, a sharp, smarmy editor named Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) offers him $200 for his story...or $500 for the story and his services in locating the wife of Adrienne's boss and lover Derace Kingsby (Leon Ames). Marlowe takes the case, but doesn't think much of Adrienne: "I have an allergy against getting mixed up with tricky females who want to knock off the boss's wife and marry him for herself." At the Kingsby's lake house in the mountains, the caretaker's wife is found drowned. Mrs. Kingsby's lover Chris Lavery (Richard Simmons) isn't doing any better. And a police Lt. DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) has taken a particular dislike to Marlowe's snooping around. -All of which leads everyone to wonder if Mrs. Kingsby is to blame for the trouble or some victim of it.

We catch the occasional glimpse of Philip Marlowe in a mirror, and he addresses the camera directly, awkwardly, several times -to introduce the case and keep us informed of his progress. But Robert Montgomery is too excited and earnest in those scenes. And when he tries a more deadpan delivery in his voice-over narration, Montgomery just sounds grouchy and affected. The wonderful hard-boiled dialogue in "Lady in the Lake" is wasted on poor delivery. Since we can't usually see Marlowe, focus is shifted to Adrienne. Having to constantly act to the camera, with Montgomery saying his lines while squatting on a platform under the camera, didn't display Audrey Totter's talent to its best advantage. Adrienne is very unnatural. Two underperforming leads sap a lot of interest out of this film, but there are some strong supporting performances. Lloyd Nolan, who may have been known best in the 1940s for playing good, wise law enforcement officers, plays a corrupt cop here. He reputedly had trouble acting to the camera, but he's terrific. The other notable performance is by Jayne Meadows as fast-talking, disturbed Mildred Haveland.

"Lady in the Lake"'s best scene by far is its last (before the epilogue scene), because it brings together the film's strong elements: Nolan, Meadows, and a slew of hard-boiled lines, delivered perfectly by Nolan: "How does it feel dying in the dirty middle of somebody else's love affair?" I sure wish I'd had some inkling of how it felt before the last scene. "Dark Passage", released later the same year (1947), is another film famous for its use of subjective camera. It also managed to show off its leads -Bogie and Bacall- rather poorly while presenting an impressive supporting cast. "Lady in the Lake" is a slightly better film than "Dark Passage", because its source material is better. But it should have been good. Instead, it's tedious.

The DVD (Warner Brothers 2006): This print is speckly in places, but not to the extent that it is distracting. Sound is good. Bonus features are a theatrical trailer and an audio commentary by film noir scholars Alain Silver and James Ursini. I think they are too enamored of the subjective camera technique, which does nothing good for this particular film, but Silver and Ursini do a nice job of exploring the implications and challenges of subjective camera. They also discuss Raymond Chandler, this interpretation of the Marlowe character, the long takes, Adrienne's expanded role, the actors, MGM's high key glamour look in the film. The commentary focuses more on technique than other Silver/Ursini commentaries that I've heard, with a lot of scene-by-scene analysis, probably because technique is this film's claim to fame.

If you know anything about this film at all, you probably know two facts: first, it's based on a Raymond Chandler novel, with Montgomery playing Phillip Marlowe, and second, that it's filmed entirely in point-of-view - the only major Hollywood film ever shot this way, though almost half of the same year's earlier DEAD RECKONING, another noir with Bogart, was done the same way. Here it's the whole shebang, with Montgomery sitting at a desk at the beginning telling us how it's going to unfold and re-appearing a couple of times over the course of the film but otherwise showing up only as the voice of the camera and occasionally in mirrored reflection.

The film gets a lot of criticism for being a "stunt" and for being lethargic, because of the need for long shots and scenes - but I thought it worked quite well, actually. Marlowe is hired by a publisher's assistant who turns out to be the real central character of the film and is played for a wonderful combination of reserve, cattishness and brashness by Audrey Totter. His assignment is to find the wife of Totter's boss (Leon Ames) who has apparently run off to Mexico to get married. Of course, it doesn't turn out to be that simple; a couple of murders happen, Marlowe may be implicated himself, there's a dirty cop (Lloyd Nolan) who has it in for our hero right away and who is himself mixed up in the case, etc.

To me the long takes - some quite virtuosic - and rather static feel of many of the scenes really helps to build the suspense, and though we know (obviously) that Marlowe himself is going to make it through to the end, none of the rest of it is crystal clear. The film uses music and sound quite excellently - there's a really amazing sequence where Marlowe is driving and the spookiness of a wordless choral piece as he motors along a deserted road outside of town at night gives a positively Lynchian feel - which continues as he's forced off the road and has to try to get out of being made to look like a drunk driver who has crashed. This entire sequence is one of the creepiest and most suspenseful in the whole classic noir cycle I think and really helps to elevate the film into special territory.

All in all, it's a fascinating experiment and certainly one of the more intriguing directorial debuts of the period. I haven't yet listened to the commentary track all the way through but I've sampled it and it's a good one. Though this is far from my absolute favorite classic noir, it is definitely one of the must-sees for it's stylistic daring and for Totter's archetypal good girl/bad firl performance.

This movie is shot entirely with a subjective camera, which means that we see the movie from the eyes of the lead character, Philip Marlowe. It make she movie more interesting, but not better nor worse than if t wouldn't have been shot that way. It just feels quite different that all the actors are looking and talking into the camera.

Robert Montgomery makes a quite good Philip Marlowe, but we don't see him much, only in mirrors and a few short scenes in which he's telling the story to us. He has a number of great one-liners, just like in Chandler's books. Most of the other actors are decent too, but not fantastic and some of them seems slightly uncomfortable looking into the camera when acting.

The plot is a little complicated, but far from as complicated as in The Big Sleep (1946), where even Raymond Chandler didn't know who was he murder of a victim, at least that's what a rumor says. This movie isn't as good as The Big Sleep either, but it is a decent, quite entertaining movie. I can recommend it, but it's not quite as good as most other Film-Noirs I have seen.

If you like 40's genre movies, this Marlowe-era mystery is a must have! Robert Montgomery does a first rate job as the infamous sleuth, and Audrey Totter is equally entertaining as the femme fatale. There's a unique Christmas theme with a twist and plenty of detective jargon throughout. As Montgomery puts it in one of his classic lines, "Phillip Marlowe, boy detective...." Don't miss this one - lots of FUN!

I don't want to wax elloquient, just say I loved the dialogue, and the interesting way the film was shot from Marlowe's point of view, literally from his point of view, as if we were him looking out on the world. I did not care for him being knocked around so often and easily. It didn't fit well with my previous conception of Marlowe as a tough guy.

A final note, the lady that plays the villian, when she impersonates the landlord, well it is a classic. So, anyway, buy this one, I don't think it will disappoint.

The 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film "Rear Window" showed us a murder through the eyes of Jimmy Stewart. Throughout the entire movie we only saw what Stewart saw, this added to the suspense the film tried to create. I personally liked the gimmick, but it seems Robert Montgomery (who does double duty as the film's director) beat him to the punch. Only I'm not sure it was a device that needed to be used.

"The Lady in the Lake" has Robert Montgomery playing Raymond Chandler's famous detective Philip Marlowe, and we go through over all the steps Marlowe has as the story is told in flashback form. First of all I don't think Montgomery was correct for the role, or maybe he was but I dislike his interpretation. I find he did comedy quite well watch Noel Coward's "Private Lives" and "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" though here he seems a little stiff. Not exactly comfortable with the role.

As I said the main problem I have with the film is the gimmick used of us basically playing the character ourselves. It's clever but it doesn't really add anything to the film. It could have been told in a conventional manner and still worked. And who knows, it could have been a better film.

Robert Montgomery directed 6 films, one of them he went uncredited for, and it just so happens that one is probably his most famous film as director, John Ford's "They Were Expendable". I haven't seen any other film he's directed, but I wasn't terribly impressed. What makes this film memorable, if it is memorable, is not the directing, the acting, the script, or anything else, its mainly the camera device used.

"The Lady in the Lake" is an OK film. I don't think it's one of the great detective stories of Hollywood's Golden Age, and I don't think Montgomery made a great Marlowe. This film made me watch to watch Bogart in "The Big Sleep" I film I prefer over this one.

Bottom-line: Decent detective story based on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character. The movie's gimmick gets in the way though and prevents it from becoming a better movie. Some of the acting, especially the performances by Audrey Totter and Montgomery seem stiff and in the case of Totter she seems to be over acting at moments. Not one of my favorites.

Drawing on his life of crimefighting to write a short story, Raymond Chandler's tough but noble P.I. Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) submits his work to Kingsby Publications, home of such pulp fiction mags as LURID DETECTIVE and MURDER MASTERPIECES. Before he can say "byline," editor Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) has Marlowe up to his neck in murder, missing dames, and crooked cops -- and you can see things Marlowe's way, literally! Before all those slasher movies came along during the last couple of decades, LADY IN THE LAKE used the subjective camera treatment -- hell, the camera was practically a character in the flick! Throughout most of LADY..., we see everything exactly as Marlowe sees it; the only times we see Marlowe/Montgomery's face is when he looks in a mirror, as well as in a brief prologue, an entrè-acte segment, and an epilogue. MGM's publicity department did its best to push it as the first interactive movie experience: "MGM presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together! YOU accept an invitation to a blonde's apartment! YOU get socked in the jaw by a murder suspect!" YOU occasionally start snickering in spite of yourself when the subjective camera gimmick teeters dangerously close to parodying itself, like when Totter moves in for a smooch with Our Hero The Camera. Some of Totter's facial expressions in the first half of the film as she spars verbally with Montgomery are pretty funny, too, though I'm not sure all of them were meant to be (she uses the arched eyebrow technique done so much more effectively later by CQ's Angela Lindvall, Eunice Gayson of DR. NO and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, Leonard Nimoy, The Rock, et al... :-). Having said that, the subjective camera technique works more often than not; in particular, I thought the fight scenes and a harrowing sequence where an injured Marlowe crawls out of his wrecked car worked beautifully. It helps that Steve Fisher provided a good solid screenplay for Raymond Chandler's novel, though Chandler purists were annoyed that the novel's pivotal Little Fawn Lake sequence was relegated to a speech in the recap scene in the middle (apparently they tried to film that scene on location, but the subjective camera treatment proved harder to do in the great outdoors, so they gave up). The performances are quite good overall, including Lloyd Nolan as a dirty cop and an intense dramatic turn by young Jayne Meadows. Montgomery's sardonic snap mostly works well for cynical Marlowe, though he sometimes forgets to tone it down during tender dialogue, making him sound simply cranky. Totter eventually tones down her mugging and becomes genuinely affecting as her Adrienne lets down her guard and begins falling for Marlowe. You may love or hate this LADY..., but if you enjoy mysteries and you're intrigued by offbeat moviemaking techniques, give her a try!

I'm thinking the folks who write the reviews take themselves a little too seriously...

This is my favorite Christmas movie--much more action than, say "Miracle on 34th Street."

All kidding aside the movie is great fun, the camera technique an interesting approach, and Audrey Totter is wonderful. I think that anyone who doesn't relish this film for the great dialog between Totter and Montgomery is truly a grinch--

(From memory) Adrienne Fromsett describing Marlowe's short story to ther publisher:

"...so vivid, so full of life...what would you say it's full of, Mr. Marlowe?"

Marlowe: "Short sentences."