★ 7 / 10
If I should die before I live! Lady
John Chard
If I should die before I live! Lady in the Lake is directed by Robert Montgomery and adapted to the screen by Steve Fisher from the novel The Lady in the Lake…
If I should die before I live!
Lady in the Lake is directed by Robert Montgomery and adapted to the screen by Steve Fisher from the novel The Lady in the Lake written by Raymond Chandler. It stars Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. Music is by David Snell and cinematography by Paul Vogel.
It's the Christmas Holidays and private detective and part time writer Phillip Marlowe (Montgomery) strolls into Kingsby Publications to submit his latest novel. Although he didn't know it at the time, his reason for being there is for different matters, and soon he is involved in missing persons and dead bodies...
Famous for being the film that used a first person gimmick (the camera is Marlowe for most of the picture), Lady in the Lake has a very divisive reputation for a number of reasons. Be it the gimmick or the portrayal of Marlowe (a much loved character to Chandler and film noir fans) by Montgomery, you will find for every person who likes the film greatly, the next person hates it. So with that you have to roll the dice and take your chance.
I have an allergy against getting mixed up with tricky females who want to knock off the boss' wife and marry him for themselves.
If able to leave aside Chandler's novel (and the writer's agitation about the film in general) , and to not let the camera as the active protagonist trick take you out of the story, then there's a good picture here. As is the Chandler way, there's a pot boiler at work as Marlowe tries to solve the cases at hand. He gets punched and slapped about, drops sarcasm quips a plenty, flirts roughly with Adrienne Fromsett (Totter) and jousts with the police as a course of nature. The mystery element is delightfully strong, suspicious behaviours and dubious motives are prominent, all of which reach a satisfying conclusion at pics end.
When it comes to women, does anybody really want the facts?
Montgomery's take on Marlowe isn't for everyone, and coming as it did just a year after Bogart had laid down a considerable marker in The Big Sleep, he was up against it. He actually does well in my book, stentorian like in delivery, wonderfully brusque of manner, and a filthy laugh to boot! His interactions with the yummy Totter and battle of wills with the cops are what make the picture worthwhile.
Perhaps you'd better go home and play with your fingerprint collection.
Unfortunately, with the gimmick in such loaded prominence, it does get a bit weary come the mid-point. The film also lacks some biting noir visuals, the story and its plotting screams out for dark shadow play and chilly chiaroscuro, but no joy in that department here. So some various irks for sure. It starts off with Christmas carols for the opening credits, and finishes on an u-noirish note, but everything in between - gimmick be damned - makes this an intriguing and entertaining Marlowe noir piece. 7/10
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★ 7 / 10
Chandler supplies grapes pinot noir? for film experiment of doubtful vintage
bmacv
For a suspense writer whose observations of mid-20th-century Los Angeles proved so gimlet-eyed that he has been enshrined as the city's unofficial bard…
For a suspense writer whose observations of mid-20th-century Los Angeles proved so gimlet-eyed that he has been enshrined as the city's unofficial bard, Raymond Chandler had a bumpy fling with Hollywood. The first of his five major novels to be filmed during the classic period of film noir, Farewell, My Lovely was first turned into an installment in the Falcon series of programmers, then into Edward Dmytryk's 1944 Murder, My Sweet (a success, but too short; to do justice to Chandler's atmospherics and milieu demands longer time spans than the movies allot them).
From 1946, probably the most adroit blending of style and content taken from his works was Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep. But its popularity, then and now, owes as much to the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and to the frisky, irreverent tone Hawks brought to the movie as to Chandler, whose outlook was one of dispassionate observation tinged with disgust.
The following year, The Brasher Doubloon, from the book The High Window, can be deemed a failure. That leaves the odd case of The Lady in the Lake, also from 47, which Robert Montgomery, starring as Philip Marlowe, ill-advisedly decided to direct himself. The movie labors under two huge handicaps: one of technique, the other of tone.
Cited often (and often by those who may not have actually seen the movie) for its subjective use of the-camera-as-character, The Lady in The Lake flounders on an idea that may have sounded good when initially floated but had to have looked bad once the first rushes came in.
Except for an explanatory prologue (the necessity for which should have raised red flags) or in scenes where he's caught in a window or mirror, Montgomery's Marlowe remains unseen. We, through the camera lens, are the detective. Conceivably, this gimmick might have worked at a later date, when swift, lithe Steadicams were part of Hollywood's technical arsenal. But in1947, the camera lumbers along as though it were being shoved through wet sand. As a result the pace slows to deadening, as though a senescent Marlowe were tracking down clues from the rail of an aluminum walker.
In consequence, time that might profitably been expended on filling in missing pieces of the puzzle gets wasted on Marlowe's getting from point A to point B. Vital and evocative parts of Chandler's novel take place in the summer resort areas of Puma Point and Little Fawn Lake; that snail of a camera, however, was not up to a hike in the great outdoors, so the movie preserves none of them.
And in tossing away chunks of the novels to accommodate budgets and shooting schedules, movie versions (like this one) mistake Chandler's strengths, which did not lay in plot. (The scriptwriters on The Big Sleep, including William Faulkner, couldn't figure out who killed one of the characters, so they asked Chandler, who didn't know either.)
His strengths were in weaving intricate webs of duplicity and deceit shot through with corruption and dread. That was heavy fare for Hollywood even during the noir cycle. So stories tended to be simplified and atmosphere lightened: the freighted response gave way to the wisecrack, suggestive tension between two characters turned into a meet-cute, the brooding loner became a red-blooded American joe.
So, in The Lady in The Lake, the icy and questionable Adrienne Fromsett of the book (Audrey Totter) is now a sassy minx to Marlowe's snappy man-about-town, and so on. The plot deals with Marlowe's attempts to find a missing woman (an off-screen character whom the Christmas-card credits, in a droll fit of Francophone humor, call Ellay Mort).
Is a verdict possible? Some viewers find the movie's conceits and distortions amateurish and self-congratulating, while others overlook them to find a vintage mystery from postwar vaults. The Lady in The Lake remains a flawed experiment that over the years has developed its own distinctive if not quite distinguished period bouquet.
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Please have these wonderful film noirs in 1080. It hurts to see only 720p. Thank you for your consideration.