Lady in the Lake (MGM, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

That’s even more true of the last Christmas-themed film noir TCM showed last Sunday, December 19: Lady in the Lake, MGM’s intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1943 novel The Lady in the Lake (which, unlike the movie, did not take place at Christmastime). The omission of the first article from the film’s title was just a hint of the drastic remodelings writer Steve Fisher (hardly at Chandler’s level but a workmanlike veteran of the pulps) and Robert Montgomery, who both directed and starred as Philip Marlowe, put Chandler’s material through. They decided in effect to turn Chandler’s book into a radio play, with Montgomery as Marlowe seated at his office desk (in a much nicer office than the one Chandler had described -- this was MGM, after all) narrating the story and periodically interrupting the action, which otherwise was shown exclusively from Marlowe’s point of view. This technique, which MGM’s publicists called “The Camera Eye,” had been previously used sporadically -- notably by Rouben Mamoulian in his 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which we don’t see star Fredric March as either Jekyll or Hyde until about 15 minutes into the film; and an obscure 1930 film called The Bishop Murder Case with Basil Rathbone as Philo Vance and the murders filmed through the killer’s eyes -- but no one had ever tried shooting almost an entire film that way.

Apparently Montgomery thought it would be a good cinematic analogue to Chandler’s first-person writing style, telling the story from Marlowe’s point of view, but it really doesn’t work at least in part for the reasons William K. Everson wrote in The Detective in Film. “When the ears pick up a sound,” Everson wrote, “the head does not have to swivel to meet it; sometimes a mere shifting of the eyes is sufficient. Or if the head moves, it does so in one swift movement, picking up no detail on the way. But certainly the head does not move in a smooth panning shot, registering every detail in focus until it reaches the object of its attention. Nor, when one walks (whether stealthily or briskly) does one walk in the measured, ritualized gait necessary for a heavy camera being pushed along by a crew.” Raymond Chandler, who worked briefly on the script before he either quit or was fired (he wrote a letter saying he would never again work on a film of one of his own books because it was “too much digging up old bones”), didn’t like the Camera Eye technique and said it was one of those silly ideas film novices were always thinking up and then realizing it wouldn’t work. “One director even wanted to make the camera the murderer,” Chandler said. “You can’t do that. The camera is too honest.” There are some nice gimmick shots involving the Camera Eye -- like the scene in which Marlowe is punched out and the one in which leading lady Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter, playing a role far inflated from the minor character she was in Chandler’s book) had to kiss him (and Montgomery as director had to tell her to kiss up so it would look natural on screen) -- but for the most part it makes the film draggy and dull.

Another problem with the movie is that Montgomery is so blatantly miscast; I can understand why he wanted to get away from the nice-guy image he’d usually played before (maybe he thought playing Philip Marlowe would revitalize his career the way it had Dick Powell’s in Murder, My Sweet at RKO three years before!), but for some reason he adopts a scratchy high-pitched voice that he seemed to feel would make him “tough.” Montgomery was never one for accents, anyway; I can remember the ghastly Irish brogue he adopted for his role in Yellow Jack (a late-1930’s MGM movie about the successful conquest of yellow fever in Panama at the turn of the last century so the Panama Canal could be built) and how I thought the movie would have been more entertaining if Montgomery had spoken in his normal voice. Lady in the Lake would have been, too -- as my husband Charles put it, “When Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell played Marlowe, they sounded cynical; Montgomery just sounds whiny” -- and my own comment was that this movie needed Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and got Robert Montgomery and Audrey Totter.

But the biggest single miscalculation behind Lady in the Lake was the total omission of any scenes taking place at the lake. Marlowe is hired by publisher Derace Kingsby (Leon Ames) -- “Kingsley” in Chandler’s novel -- to find his missing wife, who’s supposed to have run off with Southern-fried stud Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons). Marlowe goes up to Little Fawn Lake, privately owned by Kingsby, and finds that Muriel Chess, wife of Kingsby’s disabled caretaker Bill Chess, is also missing. With the assistance of county sheriff Patton, Marlowe discovers a bloated body in the lake (Chandler describes the recovery process in almost excruciating detail) whom Chess identifies as his wife Muriel. But the body is actually that of Kingsby’s wife Crystal and Muriel Chess -- whose real name was Mildred Haviland and who was involved in a scandal involving a married doctor (an abortionist, Chandler hinted) and his wife, an apparent suicide -- killed her and then fled.

Mildred was also the ex-lover of Al Degarmo (Lloyd Nolan), a once-honest cop in “Bay City” (Marlowe’s name for Santa Monica -- which he described as such a sinkhole of corruption he may have felt he needed to give it a false name to avoid a group libel suit) who fell in love with Mildred and turned crooked to cover up her crimes. One of Degarmo’s tricks is to hijack other people’s cars, crash them and frame them by pouring gin over them and reporting them for drunk driving and, in at least one case, vehicular manslaughter. (One wonders if Raymond Chandler had got this gimmick from the 1939 Warners crime film Each Dawn I Die, in which James Cagney’s character is framed just that way.) Omitting the lake scenes and just having Marlowe tell us about what happened there almost totally destroys the elaborate parallels Chandler worked out not only between the country and the city, but between honest county sheriff Patton (one of the few completely admirable characters Chandler ever wrote) and corrupt city cop Degarmo. Even more than Kiss of Death, Lady in the Lake (the movie) relies almost totally for its entertainment value on the strength of the actors playing villains; though Fisher’s script eliminated most of the backstory explanations for Degarmo’s actions Lloyd Nolan grabbed hold of the few that remained and built a characterization that makes you feel a bit sorry for him even as you hate him -- and Joyce Meadows, in just two brief scenes as Mildred (in one of which she passes herself off as Lavery’s landlord right after she’s killed him), likewise made an indelible impression. All those years Meadows was that nice little Mrs. Steve Allen -- and, as I said of her magnificent bitch-sister performance in the otherwise forgettable film Enchantment, who knew she had such a skill for playing wicked women?