Lady in the Lake (1947)
Director: Robert Montgomery
Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan
Synopsis:
Impressions:
While I was reading the source novel, this film came to my attention. I was curious to see another take on Marlowe and even more curious to see the first-person approach to delivering the story. While lead actor Robert Montgomery did some uncredited work directing They Were Expendable when John Ford was too sick to do it himself, this was his first time to head up an entire project and it was certainly ambitious of him to use such a novel technique in his first movie. In a way, this makes me think of the FMV games of the 90s. An enterprising soul could probably edit the film with some minimal gameplay elements to actually make it work. Anyway, there were a number of changes made to the original story. Cutting out Little Fawn Lake entirely was a shame, as I rather liked Marlowe's interactions with Patton and Chess. The Almore angle gets botched rather severely, and at least one major clue gets changed to needlessly obscure the actual solution to the case. I also wasn't a fan of the changes made to Ms. Fromsett's character, but so it goes.
Besides a few studio-mandated narration sequences, you only see Robert Montgomery as Marlowe in reflection. It seems like most of his lines were done in a recording booth and so sound a little more stilted than you would normally expect from a performance by an actor of his caliber. Also, I feel he's a bit too clean-cut to be Marlowe, almost like when George Sanders as the Falcon was taking Marlowe's place in The Falcon Takes Over. Speaking of stilted performances, I think because of how the film was shot, most of the actors struggle with giving a naturalistic performance. It's particularly bad when you have two or more characters in frame at a time when only one person is directly talking to the camera and the other is stuck standing there awkwardly. It was amusing seeing Lloyd Nolan as Degarmo seeing as how he took Marlowe's place in Time to Kill. He's got the tough-talking part down, but I feel a bigger actor with more physicality would've been better suited for the role (like the one uniformed cop who gets Marlowe out of his cell when he's in the can). And as much as I don't like what was done with Ms. Fromsett's character, Audrey Totter does pretty well conveying the two very different modes for the character.
All told, this is a flawed movie which doesn't live up to the original, but the novelty value alone is enough to make this worth a watch, though there is more merit to it than just that. If you're looking for a different approach to a detective flick, give it a try.
Rating:Watch It