Lady in the Lake

Robert Montgomery, USA 1947, 100 mins

Private investigator Philip Marlowe meets with Adrienne Fromsett, editor of publisher Derace Kingsby's series of crime magazines. Marlowe thinks that Adrienne wants to discuss the possibility of publishing a story he has submitted. Adrienne, however, has other business in mind. Kingsby's wife, Crystal, is missing. She wants Marlowe to find the woman so that Kingsby can instigate divorce proceedings against her. Marlowe begins his investigation, quickly discovering that nothing is quite as it seems.

Actor/director Montgomery's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel "The Lady in the Lake" is remarkable not for its story, which contains little that you couldn't find in any of 50 other film noirs of the same period, but rather for the manner of its telling. As a means of dealing with his dual role as star and director, Montgomery used the "subjective" camera to an unprecedented degree: in a conventional film the audience typically occupies a privileged, continually shifting, point of view. We move back and forth between the characters from action to reaction, with no one on screen ever acknowledging our implicit presence. In The Lady in the Lake we see everything through Philip Marlowe's eyes - the only time we see the detective on screen is when he looks in a mirror.

It might be thought that this increased subjectivity would increase the spectator's identification with the character involvement in the film. Ironically the device seems to have the opposite effect, increasing distance and emphasising the difference between spectator and character. After all, you can't choose where Marlowe looks, or how he responds to events - this is cinema rather than virtual reality. Perhaps Montgomery's use of subjective camera is too much for an audience raised on conventional cinematic techniques. Perhaps audiences would never be psychologically willing to accept it. We'll never know.

While The Lady in the Lake must, whatever the case, be regarded as a failed experiment in expanding the boundaries of cinema, it's also a film that's worthy of seeing for that very reason - particularly at a time when the vast majority of new films are creatively bankrupt.

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99