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Experiment Perilous
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by Nostalgia Merchant
Sales Rank: 21378
Price: $74.95
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A famous psychiatrist (Brent) becomes involved with a beautiful new patient (Lamarr) who happens to be married to a very rich and jealous man (Lukas). She fears her husband and when Brent comes to spirit her away, the angry husband lashes out with deadly consequences.
Viewer Reviews
Experiment Perilous, a love triangle/mystery set in turn of the last century New York city, remains unavailable in America save on VHS. Fortunately the video transfer is a good one, and shows as well as one might hope, even when blown up, as I saw it, on a large screen HD television. The film, well photographed in black and white, was nominated for an Oscar for excellence in set design.
When filming began on "Experiment Perilous", director Jacques Tourneur was only a year and one film away from his three films for Val Lewton. Much of the film's atmosphere seems carried over from Tourneur's memorable and remarkable Lewton collaborations. A dominating subject - psychology - and a major protagonist who practices psychology link "Experiment Perilous" with the first of the Lewton/Tourneur films, "Cat People". Repression, perhaps the most haunting theme of "Experiment Perilous" and almost scientifically examined throughout the film from a series of viewpoints, is also a major foundation for "Cat People" and especially "I Walked With a Zombie". Narrative is used in "Experiment Perilous" with a richness and subtlety approaching the omnifarious wizardry of "I Walked With A Zombie".
The three protagonists, Lamarr, Lukas and Brent, all came to the film under very differing circumstances. Rather than blurt out the whole plot of the movie I'll try to give a different lead in, as it were, by setting the stage.
Lamarr despite her great beauty was not making it as a major star; a very intelligent woman, she simply wasn't by nature cut out for serious acting. Earlier that year had found her happily paired for the second time with William Powell in a flimsy romance, the Heavenly Body. Lamarr took the role of a forgotten and unappreaciated wife of an older husband/astronomer, played by Powell. He spends his evenings at a nearby observatory star-gazing, though in an ugly scene only Powell could get away with, never fails to check out his wife in her negligee as she waves goodnight to him from her upstairs bedroom window. Lamarr looks as lovely as could be in a simple story poking mild fun at both science and astrology. The too-long film's high points are all Powell: his getting smashed comparing flavored Vodkas with a troop of local Russians, no doubt thrown in for war-time comaraderie; and a stunning film rendition of a comet's crash into the moon. This is nicely played in counterpoint to another meeting, this time involving a handsome young air raid warden, fated by a horoscope to fall in love with Lamarr. Such was the sort of storyline Lamarr was handling before this film.
"Experiment Perilous" finds Lamarr playing another dutiful wife, this time she is cast as Allida Bedereau, a great but very shy beauty overmatched by her powerful husband. Allida defers to anyone who confronts her, and struggles to find a role to play in balancing her sense of duty against endless attentions showered on her by the young swains of New York's social scene. A young son, troubled by nightmares, completes her desexing. The role suits Ms Lamarr to a fare-thee-well. Not forced to carry scenes and given a small range of emotions she handles her part perfectly. Her work (The Heavenly Body) with Powell in a simpler comic-romance triangle involving a repressed marriage and an attraction to a younger man paid dividends: Lamarr needs only adjust the emphasis and she acquits herself with honors.
What Hitchcock would have called a MacGuffin, a portrait of the sad-eyed beauty, helps to draw direct attention away from Lamarr; even she has no trouble stealing scenes from a picture! This painting suckers in the unwary, including a host of film critics who overestimate its importance in the face of many other facets of this thematically rich film.
The familar plot line of "Experiment Perilous", the rich jealous older man, a controlled younger wife torn between wifely duty and life with a younger man were mother's milk to 40's moviegoers. Readily following the path of least resistance, like so many specimens in a Pavolian experiment, audiences ingrained expectations gave the film-makers their opening for hiding the more troubling story of self-deception they wanted to tell in the most obvious place - right out front where anyone could see it. Just as many critics focused on the painting of Allida as an image of a trapped woman, and proceeded to steam full speed ahead with their decontructionist studies, so the audience focused in on the beautiful Ms Lamarr and wondered, "How will she be saved?" Neglecting of course to look too closely at her knight-errand. Critics completely fail to see how well Ms Lamarr played her role - audiences believe in her hook, line and sinker, and that enormous pull of sympathy swings the center of the film about her and her plight.
Paul Lucas in contrast to Ms Lamarr was at the very pinnacle of an outstanding acting career, both on stage and in the movies. He had just won the Oscar the year before for a film reprise of his Broadway role in Lillian Hellman's "Watch On the Rhein". The imbalance in acting authority between Lukas and Lamarr fit perfectly with the characters each would assume in "Experiment Perilous". Lukas was assigned the role of Nick Bedereau, an older very wealthy 1900's New Yorker who dominates his beautiful subservient wife. For reasons I will go into Lukas is not allowed the sympathy Hitchcock permits Claude Rains in a similar role in "Notorious". Released two years later, the two films are remarkably alike, save that the younger lover, played by Cary Grant, has marked character flaws, unlike George Brent's in "Experiment Perilous". A better film, "Notorious" is less subversive of its audience's overt reading of the story than is the case with Tourneur's "Experiment Perilous".
The last of this threesome, George Brent, was coming off a year's rest from movie making. Best known for his low-key style of acting, Brent had made a success of working with rather than against strong actresses, such as Bette Davis. Brent's role in "Experiment Perilous", as Dr. Hugh Bailey, was by far the greatest in screen time among the three main stars; a number of strategems were required on the part of the writers if the audience were not to lose interest with Brent, a leading man who tended to complement more than dominate. Throughout the film Dr. Bailey proves elusive of any definite personal information, in contrast to his own exceedingly curious nature of the all the details of the Bedereau family. We never learn anything about any of his family, unlike the overwheming amount of private information he derives through prying into Cissy's diary, the swinging gate from which the entire secret main narrative evolves. Dr. Bailey's personal and professional contacts with women show him ever in a dominant role - his nurse and secretary at his office; his housekeeper at his hotel; Allida Bedereau, who he sees in several locales and advises and directs as he might a pusillanimous client.
With the approval of writer/producer William Duff, who would later work with Tourneur on the Film Noir classic, "Out of the Past", Tourneur quietly devised his shots and scenes to lull his audience away from the truths he wished overlooked. Unlike his previous work under Lewton, where Lewton's morbid obsession with death dominated almost every scene, here Tourneur turned down the terror and worked out a different recognition, one involving his main narrative's personal cupidity. Like the vital letter in Poe's short story, "The Purloined Letter", a favorite of both Tourneur and his legendary father, French director Maurice Tourneur, Tourneur left his most dangerous - or perilous - message out in the open, at all times in plain sight. Free of struggling with the impossible task of asking his audience to question his narrator's motives, Tourneur could proceed unimpeded to carry narrative originality in a host of directions, easily subverting the basic story's overt premise of good versus evil without ever confronting it directly.
It must be added how remarkably alike are "Experiment Perilous" and "Laura", also from 1944. The situations of the three main leads correspond to an astonishing extent. Clifton Webb, plays a famous gossip columnist, the older man who falls in love and helps a great beauty; though unlike Lukas' character, Webb's obsession for Laura, played by the radiant Gene Tierney, goes unrequited, resulting in murder. The detective in "Laura" corresponds nicely with Dr. Bailey's role as both search for answers connected with the woman who, through a mysterious portrait, cause them to fall in love. "Laura", also released in 1944, is better remembered becasue it had a far more literate script, better acting, and a more shocking mystery. Otto Preminger, always intriqued by ambiquity, focused a great deal of audience attention on the professional versus personal issues dogging the detective investigating Laura's disappearnce/murder. In contrast, Dr. Bailey's equally serious moral ambiquitites are only mentioned by others to him - he seems untouched by doubts regarding his behavior.
Without giving away too much I will direct the curious to the opening scenes, with twin narrators and their separate stories gradually folding into a solitary story-teller. Initially we hear the voice of Brent, as Dr. Bailey, our first narrator, telling us he is about to relate a story of something that has already taken place, in the year 1903. As the story begins, he has just awakened during a storm while taking the train back from points far west to his home in New York city. He looks up and sees a frightened older woman staring back at him. Brent continues his narration, describing the woman, who we soon discover is Cissy, the older sister of Lukas's character, Nick Bedereau. (Cecilia Bederau or 'Cissy' is bestowed her 'nickname' by her younger brother Nick. The two are orphaned when following their mother's death during Nick's birth their broken-hearted father commits suicide less than a year later.) We see Cissy gabbing silently away, mouth open as she talks to Brent's character, but we only hear his paraphrasing of her actual words. Then the film shifts to the moment and we are called into the actual scene, and Cissy can suddenly be heard. Sissy is terrified of the storm and wants to sit next to the doctor for security. She tells him she is going home after many years, five, from her stay at a sanitorium. The first of the film's subversions begin here. Brent's character consoles Sissy, who correctly recognizes him as a doctor. Cissy continually worries about the train's safety, while Brent, in his role as masculine authority figure, plays down any real danger. Yet the film undercuts this with outside shots showing the speeding train traveling above badly wobbling rail ties nearly undermined by flodding, ready to wash out at any moment. The audience understands the train passengers are in mortal danger. Cissy realized what is true, and says so, while Brent's character tries to paper over danger.
I would rather not spoil the film so I'll just add that from this point in the story Brent's character, Dr. Bailey, begins lying, to himself most of all. Although he is affronted that Cissy's relatives hold a Tea party just a week following her death, thinking this highly disrespectful, he does not hesitate when given the chance to read her diary, despite Cissy's bold handwritten request on the cover, "Not For Strangers!" Brent's character's foibles go unnoticed in all the attention given to Lamarr's bad marriage to the dominating and jealous Nick.
Counting the number of times Brent's character Dr. Hunt Bailey lies is a contructive enterprise. Also a rather time-consuming one, as Bailey lies from nearly the very beginning of the story up to near the very end. The enormity of our duplicity in going along with Bailey's character is of course NEVER at any time addressed by the film. Hindsight brings us full circle to the opening - are we to trust such a person as Dr Bailey with the truth of this story as he tells it? The idea that a film's narrator could be untrustworthy, and the film's storyline therefore untrustworthy, was heresy in the mid-forties. Does Dr. Bailey actually understand how amoral he himself has become? Audiences watching the film never come away with such thoughts, all due to the sleight of hand of Tourneur and the writers. Nick Bedereau becomes such a destructive and blatantly evil monster by the film's climatic scene that no one notices the pressing need to examine the mounting evidence against Dr. Bailey's own actions. In comparison to Nick and in his actions he comes across as savior. Yet Dr. Bailey as portrayed by the quiet Brent is troubling as Lancelot, though as Allida would never be taken for a Genevieve his non-agressive acting style better suits his own fiery rescue of her. All along I recalled another Nick's observing the charming but criminal Gatsby's wild parties, 'You could get away with your own misdeeds and no one would ever notice.'
Hopefully this minor masterpiece of narrative subversion will soon be issued in a fine DVD. Is anyone at Criterion up for it?
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Experiment Perilous
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