Lady in the Lake (1947)

Director: Robert Montgomery                           Writer: Steve Fisher
Film Score: David Snell                                   Cinematography: Paul Vogel
Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows

Lady in the Lake should have worked. On paper, why wouldn’t the audience be drawn in to a completely subjective experience, where they see everything through the eyes of the protagonist? Well, because it’s weird, that’s why. To an audience thoroughly steeped in a particular kind of subjectivism that still relies on a third-person perspective, it’s just odd. What’s also strange is that Robert Montgomery begins the film with a prologue, just him sitting at a desk talking straight into the camera at the audience. Here he tries to turn the first person narrative around by making out that he’s also the writer of the piece. Again, the attempt at manipulation is off-putting. Even in the first-person narratives of detective fiction there’s no conceit that the detective is actually writing the story on paper, with a typewriter, much less submitting the thing to a publisher. Raymond Chandler’s original novel begins at a perfume company, not a magazine, and so the whole charade seems unnecessary.

The camera (as Montgomery) goes to the publisher to see about a story, when he’s told that it was just a ruse to get him to work on a case for the Leon Ames without his knowledge. His assistant, Audrey Totter, wants to find out where Ames’ wife has disappeared to so that divorce papers can be signed, one assumes so that she can become the next Mrs. Ames. Montgomery’s first stop is the boyfriend’s house. Dick Simmons invites him in, but winds up decking him and the detective wakes up in jail. Police chief Tom Tully would like to arrest him, but since he’s a private detective he’ll settle for running him out of town. The next lead, a murder up at the lake house of Ames, sets him into the mountains, though not really because the audience never sees it. It’s here that Montgomery takes another break in the action, another desecration of the fourth wall, and talks to the audience. It’s not until Montgomery goes back to see Simmons, and finds him dead, that a real murder mystery emerges. Of course there are times when the audience sees Montgomery, whenever he looks into a mirror, and I found myself wishing he would do it more often. One of the annoying traits that Montgomery also indulges in is whistling while he’s off camera, just to let the audience know he’s still there, that we are still in his viewpoint.

The first time I watched this film I though I had the wrong disc in the player because it began with Capraesque Christmas title cards. Ironic? Perhaps, but it simply adds to the general confusion of the picture. The biggest flaw by far is that the entire film seems as if it’s all exposition. It’s just Montgomery telling Totter what he found out without the audience getting to experience very much of it. And that’s the worst sin for any narrative medium: telling instead of showing. There are a couple of good scenes, the discovery of Simmons’ body and the car wreck toward the end, but for the most part there’s a sense that the scripting arose out of a desire to write around the gimmick instead of attempting to work the gimmick around a good script. The actors behave oddly as well because of this and so none of the performances are very good. All one has to do is imagine how the film would have looked without the subjective viewpoint and it would be incredibly boring to watch, which it almost is now. All of this self-conscious manipulation is what ruins the film. Lady in the Lake is a valiant attempt at something new and different for Hollywood, but like all risk-taking there’s a chance of failure. And this one definitely failed.