The New Pictures

Lady in the Lake (MGM) is an amusing cops-&-killer chase, based on Raymond Chandler's hard-breathing novel. As both director and star, ex-Commander Robert Montgomery plays Chandler's famed private detective, amoral Phillip Marlowe,* and also polishes off his first major directing job with dash and considerable imagination.

The story is as breathlessly helter-skelter as most Chandler yarns. Unlike most, it strews only a modest number of red herrings and thus makes reasonable sense at the fadeout. Detective Montgomery is hired by a glamorous crime-fiction editor (Audrey Totter) to track down the missing wife of her publisher-boss (Leon Ames). The lady of the title never appears in the film because she is dead at the bottom of a lake. Before Montgomery finally catches up with the killer--and with love--he has bulled his way through brass knuckles, a moldy jail, various sinister strangers, venal policemen, five homicides.

More notable than the kick-in-the-teeth plot is the novel technique Director Montgomery uses to tell it. Attempting to put the audience in the detective's shoes, he pretends that the camera is the detective's eyes. Many movies have used this technique in individual scenes, but no Hollywood film has ever before stuck to it consistently through fist fights, automobile chases and lovemaking. In a short introduction to the movie, Montgomery appears at a desk and looks into the camera while explaining that he is Detective Marlowe. Thereafter, he moves (taking the audience with him) behind the camera. Kis voice takes part in the dialogue and his hand appears in the foreground occasionally to open a door or pick up a cigaret. There are also glimpses of him in mirrors. But he and the camera (and the ticket buyer) are assumed to be one. The villains aim their fists straight at the audience and the heroine fondly kisses the lens.

This storytelling technique is not exactly a revolutionary development in moviemaking, but it is an unusual, effective and clever stunt, particularly well-suited to an action-crammed thriller. Most of the formidable technical problems were ingeniously solved. In his first job, Director Montgomery (who is president of the Screen Actors Guild and something of a Hollywood intellectual) dared to do something different.

Credit for the imaginative experiment must be divided equally between Montgomery (who has been nagging his studio for years to let him try it) and wealthy, conservative MGM, which did all right for itself at the 1946 box office (see above) by just sticking to big, safe production techniques and big, safe stars.

The Perfect Marriage (Hal Wallis; Paramount) takes a minor domestic spat and blows it up into a very flossy parlor-&-bedroom comedy. On their tenth wedding anniversary, David Niven and Loretta Young admit out loud that the thrill is gone. They are irritated--have been, let's face it, for years--by one another's eccentricities. What's more, each detests the other's family. And there is that old, old argument about Loretta's continuing her career as a celebrated fashion editor.

While the divorce is being discussed, David makes a lackadaisical pass at the other woman (Virginia Field) and Loretta flounces out to dinner a few times with the other man (Eddie Albert). But audiences who regard David and Loretta as too attractive a couple to be permanently separated will be reassured by the winsome maneuvers of the child, Cookie (Nona Griffith), to keep Mummy and Daddy together.

With Loretta playing a fashion expert, matinee-goers are certain to find her glittery wardrobe and house furnishings as diverting--and just about as remote from ordinary U.S. family life--as the skillfully tooled story and brightly whimsical dialogue.

Bedelia (Rank; Eagle-Lion), a British-made movie version of the Vera (Laura) Caspary whodunit, follows the slippery career of a bewitching murderess (Margaret Lockwood) who poisons one husband after another for the insurance money. She is busily trying to do in prospective victim No. 4 (Ian Hunter) when her career is halted by a suspicious claims investigator posing as a portrait painter (Barry K. Barnes).

A leisurely pace and well-bred characters often make British thrillers seem more thrilling than they really are. In spite of its polish and some competent acting, this one merely drags. Bedelia's refinement turns out to be its real villain --and suspense its ultimate victim.

Stone Flower (Mosfilm; Artklno), coming from the Soviet Union, is almost as newsworthy as a man's teeth coming to grips in the seat of a dog's pants. For Stone Flower is a fairy story, and a beauty. In the early sequences, to be sure, there is some class-angling about a cruel overseer and a fatuous nobleman. But from there on, it is pure fairy tale, as simple as profound as you like, told with gentleness and charm.

The story: young Danila, under the tutelage of an aging master-craftsman, carves a stone into the shape of a flower. It is a beautiful job, and he alone knows that much greater beauty is possible. The Queen of the Copper Mountain appears, and promises to show him a magical bloom which combines the eternity of stone with the nascent mortality of a flower. On his wedding night Danila abandons his bride for the depths of the mountain kingdom. There, amid scarcely imaginable riches, he finds the flower and perfects his imitation of it; but he is the Queen's captive. Finally, through love, steadfastness and the complex nature of the malign Queen herself, Danila and bride are reunited.

The story is directed (by Alexander Ptushko), played and set to music with such tender adroitness that its dialogue-titles are unnecessary. The Russian secret color process, nacreous in spots but in general far subtler than Technicolor, is beautifully suited to the subject; there is an exquisitely grave reproduction of peasant marriage rituals. There is also an inspired scene, as astonishing and beguiling as a dream, in which, stone by unfolding stone, the mountain unlocks the tunnel to its buried wealth. The picture can be highly recommended to children of the broadest possible age brackets (say, four to twice-40).

*Marlowe has also been impersonated in the movies by Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet), Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep) and George Montgomery in the forthcoming The Brasher Doubloon.

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