To earn a little extra cash, private eye Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) decides to turn one of his cases into a short story and send it out to several pulp magazine publishers, and one publisher, Kingsby Publications, actually shows interest in the story - that is, until Marlowe meets the editor of the company, Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), and quickly determines she's more interested in his services as a private eye than his writing, as she wants him to find the missing wife of her boss, Kingsby (Leon Ames), but without him knowing. Not too proud to turn down the healthy sum Adrienne offers, Marlowe accepts the job and starts investigations by paying a visit to Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons), who promptly knocks him out and somehow Marlowe finds himself in jail, where especially one cop, DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) is a bit too quickly on his case. Next stop is the Kingsbys' weekend home in the mountains, where Mrs. Kingsby's best friend Muriel's corpse is found at the bottom of the lake, and she has apparently been murdered. Thing is, it's soon found out Muriel has had a criminal past and was hiding out in the mountains. Soon enough, Adrienne wants Marlowe off the case, does so much as to fire him as well as trying her charms on him to distract him, but now Kingsby hires Marlowe. Marlowe pays another visit to Lavery, to meet his landlady (Jayne Meadows), who claims he owes her three months rent while for some reason waving a handgun, which she ultimately turns over to Marlowe before slipping away and leaving it to Marlowe to find Lavery dead. He calls the police, and finds DeGarmot getting very agitated when he tries to link Lavery's murder to dead Muriel in the mountains, and soon figures the two might be connected - something that's only confirmed later when his car is driven off the street and doused in alcohol. He manages to escape the wreck though and make it to Adrienne, who by now seriously cares for him (and vice versa), and once there soon runs into Kingsby who tells him his wife has called asking for money, which Marlowe is to hand over. Meeting Kingsby's wife, she turns out to be the woman who pretended to be Lavery's landlady, only she's actually neither but Muriel, who has killed Kingsby's wife in a fight over Lavery. But the real baddie of the piece is of course DeGarmot, who turns out to be a crooked cop who ultimately walks into one of Marlowe's traps. And Marlowe gets the girl, Adrienne, in the end of course ...

Today, first person narration is nothing uncommon in movies, thanks mostly to the endless string of found footage movies we're exposed to, and we're also conditioned to this kind of storytelling via videogames. However, in 1947 this method of storytelling was still highly experimental, and also quite a technical achievement due to the rather cumbersome equipment of the day. And frankly, telling a whole feature film this way sure has its downsides, as Lady in the Lake readily shows: First of all, due to the bulky equipment the film is rather slow and action can't really develop. And also the cast seems to be a little at unease with the technique, playing a bit too much right into the camera, which of course kills all chemistry. It's not made any better that Robert Montgomery's performance (as a voice actor mostly) comes across as a bit stale to wooden, or by the fact that most scenes are just one long take where editing could have added dynamics. And then there's the script that seems to have been written to fit the novelty filming style rather than to let its story unfold, and thus seems in some scenes pretty strained. In all, certainly an interesting watch due to it being an early introduction into first person narration, just not a very good movie.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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