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Saturday, January 30, 2021

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS (1944)

Riding in the wake of GASLIGHT, a big ticket M-G-M item out just six weeks earlier, this copycat RKO production substitutes Hedy Lamarr, Paul Lukas & George Brent for Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer & Joseph Cotten to predictable result.*  The leads remain: sadistic/controlling husband; fragile, tormented wife; handsome stranger to the rescue; but here, the plot a pedestal with nothing to display.  Part of the problem is structural, we never see the wife before her decline so there's no sense of what's been lost; and a pedestrian good-guy-chasing-bad-guy climax that misses the psychological thrill of Bergman’s erstwhile victim taking revenge on erstwhile torturer in GASLIGHT.  Worse, a generic, overdressed Gothic production that boxes in director Jacques Tourneur.  No match for the visually beguiling use of claustrophobic vertically-oriented interior space director George Cukor got out of M-G-M’s art department & camera work.  A rare artistic (as opposed to commercial) win for the big guy on the Hollywood block.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *A few years back, Lamarr would have starred in GASLIGHT at home studio M-G-M.  Still under contract, but fading, she was loaned to RKO for this copy while Bergman was expensively borrowed from David O. Selznick.  Lamarr returned for HER HIGHNESS AND THE BELLBOY/’45 (not seen here), her last under M-G-M contract.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html

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