As director, Montgomery's ambition was to create a cinematic version of the first-person narrative style of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels.[notes 1] With the exception of a pair each of reflections in a mirror and direct addresses to the audience in character Marlowe is never seen: the balance of the film is shot from the point of view of the central character, seeing only what he does. MGM promoted the film with the claim that it was the first of its kind and the most revolutionary style of film since the introduction of the talkies. The movie was also unusual for having virtually no instrumental soundtrack, employing a wordless vocal chorus in lieu.
The film did not use the 195-page screenplay adaptation Chandler penned for MGM in 1945. Instead, a 125-page version written by Steve Fisher was filmed two years later.[2] Seeking to capitalize on an intended Christmas theme, the script changes the novel's midsummer setting to the Holidays, frequently using cheery Yuletide themes as an ironic counterpoint to grim aspects of the story. The opening credits appear on a stack of Christmas cards, the last of which reveals a handgun.
Tired of the low pay of his profession, hard-boiled Los Angeles private detective Phillip Marlowe submits a murder story to Kingsby Publications. He is invited to the publisher's offices to discuss his work, but soon realizes it is merely a ploy. A few days before Christmas, publishing executive Adrienne Fromsett hires him to locate Chrystal Kingsby, the wife of her boss, Derace Kingsby. One month earlier, Kingsby’s wife had sent her husband a telegram saying she was heading to Mexico to divorce him and marry a man named Chris Lavery. But, according to Fromsett, Lavery says he has not seen Chrystal for two months, and the telegram appears to be fake. It becomes obvious to Marlowe that Fromsett wants her boss for herself.
Marlowe goes to see Lavery, who claims to know nothing about any trip to Mexico. Lavery, however, says that Mrs. Kingsby was a beautiful woman before revising it to "is." He sucker-punches the detective, and Marlowe wakes up in jail. He is questioned by Captain Kane and a belligerent Lieutenant DeGarmot. Marlowe refuses to divulge anything, and Kane releases him.
Marlowe learns that a woman's body has been recovered from a lake on which Kingsby owns property, and that Kingsby's caretaker, Mr. Chess, was charged with the murder of his wife Muriel. Fromsett suspects that Chrystal is the real killer, as she and Muriel hated each other. Little Fawn Lake was also where Chrystal was last seen. Marlowe learns that Muriel was an alias for a woman named Mildred Havelend and that she was hiding from a tough cop, whose description fits DeGarmot.
Marlowe goes to see Lavery again. Inside the unlocked house, he encounters Lavery's landlady, Mrs. Fallbrook, holding a gun she claims to have just found. Upstairs, he finds Lavery dead, shot several times. He also finds a handkerchief with the monogram "A F".
Before calling the police, Marlowe goes to the publishing house to confront Fromsett, interrupting a Christmas party. In private, she denies killing Lavery. Kingsby, learning that Fromsett had hired Marlowe to find Chrystal, tells her theirs will be strictly a business relationship from now on. A furious Fromsett fires the private eye, but Kingsby immediately hires him to find his wife.
Marlowe informs the police of Lavery's death. At the scene, he suggests that Muriel was hiding from DeGarmot. DeGarmot slaps Marlowe, and the two men scuffle. Kane takes Marlowe into custody, releasing him only out of Christmas spirit.
Marlowe obtains more information on Muriel from a newspaper contact. She had been a suspect in the suspicious death of her previous employer's wife. The investigating detective, DeGarmot, ruled that death a suicide; the victim's parents strongly disagreed. Marlowe finds the parents have been intimidated into silence. His car is then run off the road by DeGarmot. Regaining consciousness after the crash, Marlowe gets to a pay phone and calls Fromsett for help. She takes him to her apartment, where she claims that she has fallen in love with him. They spend Christmas Day together while he recovers from his injuries.
Kingsby receives a phone call from his wife, asking for money and, unable to find Marlowe, goes to Fromsett's apartment to ask her if she has seen the detective. Marlowe agrees to give Kingsby's money to Chrystal, as Kingsby is being followed by police detectives. Placing his trust in Fromsett, Marlowe instructs her to have the police trail him, following a trail of rice he will leave.
The woman Marlowe meets turns out to be Mildred Havelend, alias the "landlord" Mrs. Fallbrook, alias Muriel. She killed Chrystal – the "lady in the lake" of the title – in addition to her former employer's wife and Lavery. DeGarmot was in love with Havelend and helped her cover up the first murder. Then she fled from him and married Chess.
Havelend pulls a gun on Marlowe in her apartment. DeGarmot tracks them down, having overheard Fromsett speaking to Captain Kane and following Marlowe's trail of rice. He plans to kill them both with Havelend's gun and stage it to look like she and Marlowe shot each other. DeGarmot then shoots a pleading Mildred several times. Kane arrives just in time to gun down his own crooked cop, saving Marlowe.
Cast
Robert Montgomery as Phillip Marlowe ("Phillip" spelled with two "l"s, rather than with one[3][4])
The "actress" credited as playing Chrystal Kingsby, "Ellay Mort", is an inside joke, as the character is never seen in the film. The name is a homonym of the French "elle est morte," meaning "she is dead".[5]
Production
Making Lady in the Lake was Robert Montgomery's idea. He had stood in as director for John Ford on They Were Expendable when Ford got sick, and he wanted to direct again. He convinced MGM to buy the rights to Chandler's latest novel, The Lady in the Lake, for which the studio paid a reported $35,000.[6] Since Chandler had co-written the screenplay for Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and then had received another nomination for his script for The Blue Dahlia, Montgomery wanted Chandler to write the screenplay for Lady in the Lake. This resulted in the 195-page screenplay which has been called "remarkably bad". Montgomery then brought in Steve Fisher to completely re-write the screenplay. (Chandler and Fisher had both been writers for Black Mask magazine in the 1930s.) Fisher made major changes, such as re-setting the time of the film to the Christmas holiday, and dropping all the scenes which took place at the lake. Chandler objected to these changes, and was insulted that another writer was changing his story, but he still insisted that he be given a screenplay credit, until he saw the final result, when he demanded that his name be removed from the film.[7]
Robert Montgomery and Audrey Totter, reflected in a mirror in Lady in the Lake
Montgomery tried a technique that had often been talked about in Hollywood but never used in a major film: he used the camera as the protagonist of the film. Other characters talk directly to the camera. The voice of Marlowe is that of Montgomery, but his face is shown only in reflections. MGM objected to Montgomery's first-person idea, since it meant that the star of the film would only be seen infrequently; so the studio insisted that Montgomery film a prologue where Marlowe, in his office, explains what was happening; the setting was returned to briefly several times during the film, and at the end.[7] Various techniques had to be devised to make the subjective camera look realistic. For instance, in order to simulate the protagonist walking, John Arnold, executive head of photography at MGM, developed a new kind of camera dolly, with four independent wheels, allowing the dolly to walk through doors and up stairs.[8] A seat was also attached to the front of the dolly for Montgomery to sit in, so that the actors could see and play off of him as filming took place. For the fight scenes, Paul C. Vogel, the director of photography, used a modified Eyemo camera with a flexible shoulder harness.[5]
Reviews of the film were not appreciative of the new approach. Most critics gave the director credit for trying an experimental technique but felt that it was a "gimmick", and that the experiment had been a failure.[9][5]
Box office
According to MGM records the film earned $1,812,000 in the US and Canada and $845,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $598,000.[1][10]
Lux Radio Theater presented a 60-minute radio adaptation of the movie on February 9, 1948, with Montgomery and Totter reprising their roles.[12] A recording of the production is available as a streaming audio.[13]
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.
Robert Montgomery (; born Henry Montgomery Jr.; was an American actor, director, and producer. He began his acting career on the stage, but was soon hired by MGM. Initially assigned roles in comedies, he soon proved he was able to handle dramatic ones, as well. He appeared in a wide variety of roles, such as the weak-willed prisoner Kent in The Big House, the psychotic Danny in Night Must Fall, and Joe, the boxer mistakenly sent to Heaven in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The last two earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Murder, My Sweet is a 1944 American film noir, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Dick Powell, Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley. The film is based on Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. It was the first film to feature Chandler's primary character, the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe.
Audrey Mary Totter was an American radio, film, and television actress and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the 1940s.
The Lady in the Lake is a 1943 detective novel by Raymond Chandler featuring the Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe. Notable for its removal of Marlowe from his usual Los Angeles environs for much of the book, the novel's complicated plot initially deals with the case of a missing woman in a small mountain town some 80 miles (130 km) from the city. The book was written shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and makes several references to America's recent involvement in World War II.
Playback is a novel by American-British writer Raymond Chandler featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe. It was first published in Britain in July 1958; the US edition followed in October that year. Chandler died the following year; Playback is his last completed novel.
The Big Sleep is a 1946 American film noir directed by Howard Hawks. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay, which adapts Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in a story that begins with blackmail and leads to multiple murders.
The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and follows Marlowe's investigation of a missing persons case and blackmail scheme centered around a Hollywood starlet. With several scenes involving the film industry, the novel was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949 and was released in the United States three months later.
The Brasher Doubloon is a 1947 American crime film noir directed by John Brahm and starring George Montgomery and Nancy Guild. It is based on the 1942 novel The High Window by Raymond Chandler.
The Long Goodbye is a 1973 American satirical neo-noir film directed by Robert Altman and written by Leigh Brackett, based on Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel. The film stars Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and features Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, Mark Rydell, and an early, uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Paul C. Vogel, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer. His credits included The Tell-Tale Heart (1941), Angels in the Outfield (1951), The Tender Trap (1955), High Society (1956), The Time Machine (1960), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), Hold On!, and Return of the Seven.
Marlowe is a 1969 American neo-noir film starring James Garner as Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe. Directed by Paul Bogart, the film was written by Stirling Silliphant based on Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister.
The Kane family is a fictional family on the ABC daytime soap opera All My Children, and reside in the fictional town of Pine Valley. The family debuted when the show debuted, being one of the core families on the show alongside the Martins and the Tylers.
Farewell, My Lovely is a 1975 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Dick Richards and featuring Robert Mitchum as private detective Philip Marlowe. The picture is based on Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940), which had previously been adapted for film as Murder, My Sweet in 1944. The supporting cast features Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Jack O'Halloran, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton and hardcore crime novelist Jim Thompson, in his only acting role, as Charlotte Rampling's character's elderly husband Judge Grayle. Mitchum returned to the role of Marlowe three years later in the 1978 film The Big Sleep, making him the only actor to portray the character more than once in a feature film.
Summer Holiday is a 1948 American musical-comedy film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Mickey Rooney and Gloria DeHaven. The picture is based on the play Ah, Wilderness! (1933) by Eugene O'Neill, which had been filmed under that name by MGM in 1935 with Rooney in a much smaller role, as the younger brother. Though completed in October 1946, this film sat on the shelf until 1948.
Abandoned is a 1949 American crime film noir starring Dennis O'Keefe, Gale Storm and Jeff Chandler.
The Falcon Takes Over, is a 1942 black-and-white mystery film directed by Irving Reis. The B film was the third, following The Gay Falcon and A Date with the Falcon (1941), to star George Sanders as the character Gay Lawrence, a gentleman detective known by the sobriquet the Falcon.
Marlowe is a 2022 neo-noir crime thriller mystery film directed by Neil Jordan, who co-wrote the screenplay with William Monahan. Based on the 2014 novel The Black-Eyed Blonde by John Banville, writing under the pen name Benjamin Black, the film stars Liam Neeson as brooding private detective Philip Marlowe, a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler, and features Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Alan Cumming, Francois Arnaud, Ian Hart, Danny Huston, Daniela Melchior and Colm Meaney.
References
Informational notes
↑ In the film, Marlowe's name is spelled "Phillip" – with two "L"s – in the opening credits as well as on his detective license.
Citations
1 2 3 The Eddie Mannix Ledger, Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study.
↑ Staff (January 24, 1947). "Lady in the Lake". The New York Times. Retrieved July 16, 2013. In making the camera an active participant, rather than an off-side reporter, Mr. Montgomery has, however, failed to exploit the full possibilities suggested by this unusual technique. For after a few minutes of seeing a hand reaching toward a door knob, or lighting a cigarette or lifting a glass, or a door moving toward you as though it might come right out of the screen the novelty begins to wear thin
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