Lady in the Lake

“YOU accept an invitation to a blonde’s apartment. YOU get socked in the jaw by a murder suspect.” Actor Robert Montgomery, who also stars, made his directorial debut with this one-of-a-kind noir oddity, a brave experiment in the use of subjective camera. Adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel, Lady in the Lake has Montgomery as Chandler’s fave private eye Philip Marlowe, here drawn into a dangerous web of intrigue when he’s hired at Christmastime to find the missing wife of a wealthy magnate. (In a sly pulp-fiction move, screenwriter Steve Fisher, who also penned Dead Reckoning, makes the tycoon a crime-magazine publisher; he was a perfume mogul in Chandler’s original.) The film is legendary (but not universally loved) for its novel attempt at POV filmmaking; it is shot, almost entirely, from the first-person perspective of Marlowe, who is glimpsed only in mirrors (and in occasional direct addresses to the audience). The studio hyped the unusual approach as a milestone in movie story-telling: “A revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began!” Chandler himself called it “a cheap Hollywood trick.” Great snappy dialogue, oddball and tough-guy characters, and complicated plot twists complement the weird variation on the always-off-kilter noir universe. B&W, 35mm. 105 mins.