Fan’s Film Review: Expriment Perilous (1944)

Some visitors are kind enough to send me their reviews of Hedy films. I’ll be happy to share them in this blog.

We can start with Experiment Perilous (1944) because it’s one of my favorite Hedy looks.

This review below was written by Peter Andres

Good direction and good performances can’t save a confusing and stale script

Hedy Lamarr delivers an adequate performance in this Gothic thriller, directed by the atmospheric RKO director Jacques Tourner and set in 1903 New England and New York City. However, a mediocre script by Warren Duff (who also produced the film) and a downright boring starring performance by George Brent weaken the film considerably.

Hedy, who was born in Vienna, Austria, was under contract to MGM and was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world at the time. She was offered the leading lady role to Gaslight (1944), a Gothic thriller which was produced by MGM and based on Patrick Hamilton’s play of the same name. However, the role eventually went to Ingrid Bergman, who dearly wanted to star alongside Charles Boyer and, in the process, won an Oscar for Best Actress as the psychologically tortured wife. So Hedy decided to play a psychologically tortured wife in this Gothic thriller produced at RKO, which is nowhere near as intriguing or straightforward as Gaslight. Due to the unsatisfactory script of Experiment Perilous, it’s difficult to imagine Hedy playing the leading lady role in Gaslight as well as Ingrid Bergman played it.

Alec steals one moment with Allida. Soon after is he killed by her husband.

Paul Lukas, another favorite European actor of mine, is excellent as Hedy’s cunning husband. Special mention should go to Margaret Wycherly (White Heat) as a maid in George Brent’s hotel room. The film’s Oscar-nominated production design is exquisite and opulent and Tony Gaudio’s black-and-white cinematography is moody and haunting. RKO composer Roy Webb adds a familiar music score, which includes a waltz on the soundtrack that was later used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). However, that’s all I have to say about the film’s positive elements.

The script seems to indicate that Hedy’s character is a Vermont farm girl (!) and seems so misguided that any plausibility the plot should have contained is thrown out the window. There’s even a spectacular climactic explosion that seems to come out of nowhere! Due to a murky script that lacks focus and plausibility and George Brent’s wooden performance as a compassionate doctor who helps Hedy through her emotional and mental torment, the film leaves a lot to be desired.

Tourner’s atmospheric direction makes good use of Paul Lukas’ superior acting skills and interesting cinematography, which make the film worth watching despite its shortcomings. While Experiment Perilous isn’t a terrible film, it isn’t a particularly good one, either.

“I don’t just want a house”

“I want the house” is such a common sentiment in films about women that is used in a dramatically contrary way to illustrate what a different kind of woman the leading lady is in H. M. Pulham, Esq. Hedy Lamarr plays the glamorous and beautiful Marvin Myles, another in a series of 1940s heroines who have masculine names. She is definitely a liberated woman, and as such is both the romantic ideal the hero loves and the woman who is wrong, wrong, wrong for him. She has her own apartment, drinks cocktails, and puts makeup on in public, three things that good women presumably do not do. Marvin knows what she wants out of life: a butler, riches, things, but also the right to work for her own living. Without that she says, she would shrink, “There would be nothing left of me.”

Hedy Lamarr as Marvin Myles and Bob Young as Harry Pulham

Of course, in watching hundreds of old movies, one becomes familiar with the female character who wants independence until she falls in love and changes her mind, or for the hero to  make her see how wrong she is. In H.M.Pulham, Esq, that moment never comes. When Marvin firmly explains that she is not made to be at sewing circles or out buying drapes, Pulham (Robert Young) tells her, “You are wrong, because you’ll have a home of your own someday.” Marvin yells out, “I don’t just want a house!”

This brands her truly subversive heroine, and one who is not destined to be with a man at the final clinch. Marvin explains clearly to Pulham that if there is to be a house, she will buy it herself. She feels she is defined by her work and her independent world. If she marries him and goes to his world, she will be without status of her own; her only status will be his status. In the end they do not marry, and she goes on to get her butler, her riches, her yacht, and even a husband whom she marries just because she thinks he resembles Pulham. She has her success and her money, and although she doesn’t look particularly happy, the film doesn’t take it away from her. She didn’t want a house which meant she was rejecting a woman’s world.