Lady in the Lake(1947).The camera shows Phillip Marlowe's view from the first-person in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's book. The detective is hired to find a publisher's wife, who is supposed to have run off to Mexico. But the case soon becomes much more complicated as people are murdered. Written byKen Yousten <kyousten@bev.net>... Synopsis Lady in the Lake(1947)
Movie Title: Lady in the Lake(1947)
Run Time: 105 min
Rating: 6.6 / 10
Genres: Crime |Film-Noir |Mystery
Release Date: 14 April 1947 (Sweden)
Director: Robert Montgomery
Writer: Steve Fisher ,Raymond Chandler (novel)... and other credits
Actor: Robert Montgomery,Audrey Totter,Lloyd Nolan
The first-person perspective could be viewed as a brave experiment or a case-study of why nobody EVER makes movies this way. Three points:
1) In a movie, we like to see the main character reacting.
2) Actors look self-conscious when endlessly talking to a camera.
3) The lack of edits makes many scenes tedious.
Still, you can admire how hard all this was to stage and shoot, in a age when cameras weighed a ton, made too much noise and nobody owned a Steadicam. Reminds me of the kind of crazy gimmicks Hitchcock sometimes tried but Hitch would have never let the train go this far off the tracks.
