The lady in the lake
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The lady in the lake |
| Original title | Lady in the Lake |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1947 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert Montgomery |
| script | Steve Fisher |
| production | George Haight |
| music | David Snell |
| camera | Paul Vogel |
| cut | Gene Ruggiero |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Dame im See (Original title: Lady in the Lake ) is a film noir from 1947 , based on the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler . In terms of film history, it is a unique example of a commercial film in which the subjective camera was used almost entirely .
action
The hardened private detective Philip Marlowe has had enough of the poor pay for his work and presents a crime story written by him to the publishing house "Kingsby Publications". When he was invited to the publisher's office on Christmas Eve, the publisher Adrienne Fromsett was not interested in his literary attempt, but hired him to track down the wife of her boss Derrace Kingsby: Crystal Kingsby.
Crystal sent a telegram to her husband a month earlier that she had moved to Mexico to divorce him and to marry a man named Chris Lavery. But, according to Fromsett, Lavery said he hadn't seen Crystal in two months, she was missing and the telegram was a fake. Marlowe quickly realizes that Fromsett is interested in her boss (primarily because of the money, which she later admits).
When Marlowe visits Lavery himself, the latter claims not to know anything about a trip to Mexico. He makes a slip of the tongue when he claims: "Mrs. Kingsby 'was' a beautiful woman ”, which he then corrects to“ is ”. Lavery Marlowe knocks on this. The private detective wakes up in a prison where he is questioned by Captain Kane and the very aggressive Lieutenant DeGarmot. When Marlowe refuses to reveal anything about the case, Kane warns him not to cause any trouble in his district and lets him go.
Marlowe finds out that the body of a woman was discovered in a lake owned by Kingsby. Kingsby's administrator there, Mr. Chess, suspects that it is his wife Muriel. Fromsett suspects that Crystel killed Muriel because the two couldn't stand each other. Also, the last time Crystal was seen was at Little Fawn Lake. Marlowe researches and informs Fromsett that Muriel was a pseudonym for a woman named Mildred Haviland and that she was hiding from a tough cop whose description fits Lieutenant DeGarmot. Marlowe visits Lavery again, where he meets Lavery's caretaker, Mrs. Falbrook, in the unlocked house, who is holding a gun that she claims to have just found. Upstairs, Marlowe finds Lavery dead in the shower, he was shot several times. He also finds a handkerchief with the monogram “AF”.
Before Marlowe calls the police, however, he interrupts a Christmas party at the publishing house to confront Fromsett with the allegations. In a one-on-one conversation, she claims that she did not kill Lavery. Kingsby interrupts the conversation and learns that Fromsett has hired Marlowe to find Crystal. Kingsby informed Fromsett that the two would only have a business relationship from now on. The angry Fromsett fires Marlowe, who at the same time gets a new job from Kings: He is supposed to find his wife. Marlowe then informs the police about Lavery's death. He also implies that Muriel was hiding from DeGarmot. The two men physically argue before Kane intervenes and sends Marlowe out.
The private detective learns from a contact at the newspaper that Muriel was a suspect in the mysterious death of the wife of her former employer Florence. The investigating police officer at the time, DeGarmot, came to the conclusion that Florence had committed suicide - but the victim's parents still do not believe in this possibility. When Marlowe questions the two of them, it emerges that DeGarmot intimidated them into preventing them from going public. Marlowe is then pushed off the road by DeGarmot in the car, where he loses consciousness. After recovering it, he calls Fromsett for help on a phone. She takes him to her apartment, where she tells him that they have a lot in common and that she fell in love with him.
Kingsby shows up and tells Marlowe that he has received a telegram from his wife asking for money. Marlowe wants to hand over the money, but Kingsby is followed by the police. Marlowe gives his life into Fromsett's hands when he assigns her to distract the police for 10 minutes and follow a trail of grains of rice he laid. The woman Marlowe meets turns out to be Mildred Haviland, aka Mrs. Falbrook or Muriel. She killed Crystal (the "Lady in the Lake"), Florence and Lavery. DeGarmot had fallen in love with Haviland and helped her cover up the first murder, but she fled it and married Kingsby's steward.
DeGarmot tracks down Marlowe and Haviland (he had overheard Fromsett talking to Captain Kane and followed Marlowe's rice trail). DeGarmot wants to kill Marlowe and Haviland and make it appear as if they shot each other. He uses Haviland's weapon to do this. DeGarmot kills Haviland, but Captain Kane intervenes just in time to shoot down his deceitful colleague. Marlowe and Fromsett leave New York to start a new life.
Special feature of the cinematic staging
The literary adaptation is the most famous example in film history in which the subjective camera is used. The entire film is told almost exclusively from the point of view of Philip Marlowe. This is unusual and has caused criticism, because the classic narrative style in almost every movie is authorial . The neutral camera is not bound to spatial or temporal restrictions, while the subjective camera position shows the audience what is happening on the screen from the perspective of a protagonist. Perhaps the viewer gets the impression that the subjective camera is only showing him something or he perceives this narrative style, which runs through the entire film, as cramped and claustrophobic.
The principle of the first-person camera film is only broken twice when Marlowe addresses the audience from a neutral perspective at the beginning and at the end of the film , looking directly into the camera. So he sets the framework for the story told in a flashback. So that the subjective optical view is observed extremely strictly, in contrast to z. B. to another attempt at the same time, The Black Snake with Humphrey Bogart from 1947, in which the story is told exclusively for the first half hour from the subjective point of view of an escaped convict who then undergoes facial surgery. The film then tells the story from a neutral perspective again. In The Lady in the Lake , however, there are always moments of reflection that show the main actor Robert Montgomery looking into a mirror in different situations.
The experiment with the subjective camera in The Lady in the Lake and in The Unknown Face is generally considered to have failed. This narrative style has not caught on because the consistent perspective of a subjective camera obviously encounters technical, physiological and psychological obstacles. The camera's field of view does not work like the human eye and the rigid gaze of the camera makes everything equivalent, because the camera cannot show any emotions and react accordingly bored, happy or sad. In 2004, in the German movie Truth or Dare, in contrast to Die Dame im See, a subjective camera was not used consistently, but only in some scenes. The image design is conventional so as not to distract the viewer's attention from the story. Truth or Dare has won numerous awards.
Cinematic inadequacies become clear, especially when compared with the first-person narrator of a novel . In literature, the first-person narrator describes the perception of the events and shows how he processes what he has seen, which leads to an interpretation of the diegetic world . The camera, on the other hand, records completely neutrally. Nevertheless, there are experiments in which the subjective camera has been used quite successfully, e.g. B. the Kafka film The Metamorphosis from 1975 or the Mexican feature film Intimacies in a Bathroom from 1989. The protagonist's perspective is familiar from computer games. In 2014, the Russian director Ilja Naischuller started an experiment with the subjective camera based on first-person shooters in his action film Hardcore .
background
MGM bought the rights to Chandler's novel for $ 35,000. With a budget of € 1,026,000, the film made just under $ 600,000 in profit, according to MGM records.
In Germany, the film did not appear on television until October 18, 1977.
reception
In the same year of publication, The New York Times criticized the fact that the technology of the subjective camera did not work.
Lexicon of International Films : Formally interesting crime film based on a novel by Raymond Chandler.
Web links
- Lady in the Lake in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Lady in the Lake trailer onYouTube
Individual evidence
- ↑ The exhibition FILM NOIR! In: deutsches-filminstitut.de. Retrieved August 18, 2015 .
- ↑ Icons of Film Noir. 2013, accessed August 18, 2015 .
- ↑ Night and shadow . In: The time . ( online [accessed August 18, 2015]).
- ↑ a b The black adder. In: www.filmzentrale.com. Retrieved August 18, 2015 .
- ↑ Andreas Rauch: 20 basic rules for camera movements. Film and Video Club Villach, November 1, 2005, accessed on August 18, 2015 .
- ↑ Maren Ottlinger: Form-Aesthetic Basics of Film Design. A manual for video work. (No longer available online.) In: Diploma thesis, Fachhochschule Dortmund. 2004, p. 84 , archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on August 18, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Markus Kuhn: The narrative potential of the handheld camera. For the functionalization of hand-held camera effects in feature films and fictional film clips on the Internet . In: DIEGESIS . tape 2 , no. 1 , January 1, 2013, ISSN 2195-2116 ( online [accessed August 18, 2015]).
- ↑ Truth or Dare, film released June 1, 2006. 2006, accessed on August 18, 2015 .
- ↑ Kamp, Werner, Rüsel, Manfred: From dealing with film. Cornelsen, Berlin 1998, pp. 100-104.
- ^ Daniel Lehmann: Hardcore - action film in first person perspective . In: sueddeutsche.de . ISSN 0174-4917 ( online [accessed August 18, 2015]).
- ↑ SCREEN NEWS .: Oberon and Corvin Will Star at Universal Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times (1923-Current file) [New York, NY] February 21, 1945: 12.
- ^ The New York Times . Film review, January 24, 1947. Retrieved December 29, 2007.
- ↑ The Lady in the Lake. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
