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"But it's in the byways that the secrets and wonders lie." The famous opening is expanded in Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, subjective tracking shots beginning at a pipe organ and moving by carriage to the university hall, with a stop before the mirror so Dr. Jekyll (Fredric March) can adjust cape and top hat. The gentleman of science has a theory on the duality of the human psyche and an engagement to the general's daughter (Rose Hobart), and is not blind to the effect a music-hall singer (Miriam Hopkins) can have on a frustrated bachelor. (She smilingly faces the camera and doffs her garters, her bare calf dangles in his mind courtesy of a lap dissolve.) "That's not a matter of conduct, but of elementary instinct." Rouben Mamoulian's innovations perfectly suit this analysis of the experimenter's impetus, of the lusty id tearing through Victorian fabric: The elixir is gulped down in the laboratory and layered filters darken the grimacing close-up, out of the expressionistic whirlpool rises the troglodyte unchained. Facing the delayed lay of a postponed marriage, Mr. Hyde terrorizes the voluptuous blonde as "the concentrate of pure evil" so admired by Nabokov. Diagonal wipes fashion split-screens, Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is curtailed by a hungry cat. The sensitive coward and the candid monster, two halves of the abusive relationship. "Do you want your eyes and your soul to be blasted by a sight that would stagger the devil himself?" The healer at the end of the trail of bodies, mourned only by his valet as a cauldron spills over in the foreground. Renoir is concurrent with La Chienne, and there's Le Testament du docteur Cordelier nearly two decades later. Cinematography by Karl Struss. With Holmes Herbert, Edgar Norton, Halliwell Hobbes, and Tempe Pigott. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |