Lady in the Lake is a 1946 film noir directed by and starring Robert Montgomery. The movie is based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name, featuring his famous private detective Philip Marlowe.
Chandler drafted an adaptation of his novel for the movie, but Montgomery was unhappy with the script and brought in another writer to revise it. Chandler was reportedly furious that another writer had changed his work. The dispute eventually reached the point where, after seeing a screening of the finished movie, Chandler wanted his name removed from the film altogether.
But the screenplay controversy is not what makes Lady in the Lake memorable.
What makes the movie truly unusual is Montgomery’s decision to shoot most of the film from a first-person perspective. The audience literally sees the story through the eyes of Philip Marlowe. When Marlowe walks into a room, we walk into the room. When someone speaks to Marlowe, the actor looks directly into the camera and speaks to us. We see Marlowe himself primarily when he looks into a mirror or during the few scenes in which Montgomery directly addresses the audience.
In other words, Montgomery wasn’t satisfied with having the audience watch Philip Marlowe solve a mystery. He wanted the audience to be Philip Marlowe.
It is a fascinating experiment.
I have rarely seen the technique used to this extent. I remember seeing something similar in an episode of M*A*S*H and during part of an episode of Scrubs, but otherwise it is not a filmmaking technique I have encountered very often.
The production itself must have presented some interesting challenges. Although Montgomery plays the main character, he remains largely unseen for most of the movie. He reportedly sat beneath the camera as it moved on a dolly, allowing him to deliver Marlowe’s dialogue and interact directly with the other actors even though the audience could not see him.
Another unusual aspect of Lady in the Lake is its sparse use of music. Rather than relying on a conventional instrumental score, the film uses voices. A choir sings a Christmas song near the beginning, and toward the end the choir returns, this time singing wordlessly.
That Christmas connection is not accidental. Turner Classic Movies has included Lady in the Lake in its Christmas programming. The movie is not really about Christmas, but the story does take place during the holiday season.
So perhaps Lady in the Lake qualifies as a Christmas movie in the same way Die Hard does.
THE STORY
In Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe takes a break from detective work and decides to try his hand at writing. He sends a manuscript to a publisher and receives a letter from someone identified as A. Fromsett, asking him to come to the publisher’s office.
The mysterious A. Fromsett turns out to be Adrienne Fromsett, played by Audrey Totter.
Fromsett expresses interest in Marlowe’s manuscript, but she has another reason for bringing him to the office. She wants to hire him to investigate the disappearance of her boss’s wife.
Marlowe is skeptical of Fromsett’s motivations, but he takes the case anyway. Predictably, he soon finds himself dragged into a world of lies, murder, deceit, and crooked cops.
Because Montgomery remains largely hidden behind the camera, much of the burden of carrying the film falls on the supporting cast. That creates another interesting consequence of the first-person experiment. The actors are not simply performing with Montgomery—they are frequently performing directly into the camera.
Audrey Totter handles that challenge particularly well as Adrienne Fromsett. Her character has to hold Marlowe’s attention while simultaneously keeping him—and the audience—uncertain about what she really wants. Because we are seeing her from Marlowe’s perspective, her expressions and delivery become especially important. We are forced to study her in much the same way Marlowe would, trying to decide whether she is telling the truth, manipulating him, or doing a little of both.
That uncertainty makes her one of the strongest parts of the movie.
TF’S NOTES
Overall, I enjoyed Lady in the Lake.
Does the first-person gimmick work?
Sometimes.
There are moments when it becomes a little exhausting. After a while, I found myself wanting the camera to pull back and simply let me watch the movie. The technique occasionally calls so much attention to itself that you begin thinking about the camera rather than the story.
But I also found the experiment fascinating.
It is easy to understand why such an unconventional production would have been a difficult sell to a movie studio in the 1940s. Montgomery was attempting something radically different from the traditional Hollywood filmmaking of the period. Whether the experiment completely succeeds is almost beside the point. Someone was willing to try it.
And that may be what I like most about Lady in the Lake.
Montgomery wasn't satisfied with having the audience sit in a theater and watch Philip Marlowe investigate a murder mystery. He tried to eliminate the distance between the audience and the character. Instead of watching Marlowe walk through the door, we walk through the door. Instead of watching someone lie to Marlowe, they lie directly to us.
In that sense, Lady in the Lake feels like an early attempt to make a movie interactive.
Other filmmakers would later experiment with different ways of breaking down the barrier between the movie and the audience. John Waters did it much more literally with his 1981 film Polyester and its infamous “Odorama” gimmick. Audience members were given scratch-and-sniff cards containing numbered scents. When a number appeared on the screen, viewers scratched the corresponding number on the card and smelled what the characters were supposedly smelling.
The idea was ridiculous, but that was part of the fun. Waters was once again changing the audience from passive observers into participants.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show took audience participation even further, although much of that interaction developed from the fans rather than from the filmmakers themselves. Audiences began talking back to the screen, dressing as the characters, using props and essentially turning a movie screening into a live event.
These movies are obviously very different from Lady in the Lake, but the underlying idea connects them: What happens when watching a movie is no longer enough?
Montgomery attempted to answer that question in 1946 by putting the audience behind Philip Marlowe’s eyes.
The result is not perfect. In fact, the very technique that makes Lady in the Lake fascinating can also make it frustrating. But I would rather watch a filmmaker take an ambitious swing and occasionally miss than watch something that never attempts anything unusual at all.
Lady in the Lake may not be one of the greatest film noirs ever made, but it is certainly one of the most unusual.
And nearly eighty years later, we're still talking about the experiment.
That alone makes it worth watching.