Sunday, 12 November 2023

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS


 This highly unusual B-Movie has been totally forgotten even among aficionados of both its star, Hedy Lamarr and its director, Jacques Tourneur. It's hardly one of Tourneur's masterpieces but it's a fascinatingly noirish mystery nevertheless and Lamarr is excellent as the beautiful woman who may or may not be mad or the victim of a controlling husband. He's Paul Lukas who, despite winning an Oscar for playing a sympathetic anti-fascist, was always at his best playing the bad guy. The hero is George Brent, the good doctor trying to figure it all out and make sense of a chance meeting on a train.

In many respects it's a fairly typical 'women's picture', closer to a Gothic Romance than a film noir and its period setting may remind you a little of "Gaslight" and there's good supporting performances from the likes of Albert Dekker, Margaret Wycherly and George N. Neise. If Lamarr was no Greta Garbo she was still one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen and if you need proof of that you need look no further than here. More than a curiosity, this has a lot to recommend it.

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