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Robert Montgomery raised the degree of difficulty for his directorial debut, shooting Lady in the Lake almost exclusively from a first person point of view, the camera serving as the eyes of famed private eye Phillip Marlowe (played by Montgomery himself). Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel, the plot is brisk and somewhat complicated, revolving around a missing woman and a string of related murders. While the action is narrated by Montgomery’s bitter, stentorian voice, the film visually fixates on Audrey Totter in a standout performance of emotional range, tottering (sorry) on the fence between femme fatale and victim throughout. (She even famously kisses the camera lens.) Just as innovative as the point of view is David Snell’s soundtrack of dramatic choral music, occasionally appropriate for the story’s Christmas setting but more often adding creepy atmospherics to scenes like Marlowe’s face-down crawl from a car crash and a genuinely frightening sequence in which Marlowe breaks into a suspect’s home to discover a corpse in the shower.
