Robert Montgomery got his first taste of directing while on location filming John Ford's "They Were Expendable" (1945). Ford had fallen 20 feet off a scaffold and broke his leg near the end of filming and put Montgomery to work directing the PT boat scenes. The move had been a poetic one when Ford upbraided him in front of cast and crew for suggesting a different way to direct a scene earlier in the day. But Ford knew Montgomery could handle directing these scenes having been an actual PT commander at Guadalcanal and Normandy during World War 2, and that gave Montgomery an advantage over "...Expendable" star John Wayne.
The decision gave Montgomery the directing bug and actively convinced MGM to buy the Raymond Chandler's latest novel The Lady in the Lake which they paid $35,000 for. Montgomery also persuaded Chandler to write the screenplay, resulting in a 195-paged screenplay "which is utterly remarkable for how bad it is. Yes, it has great dialogue -- pages and pages of it [...] delivered by characters having nothing to do with the plot [...] A totally unmanageable script from one of Chandler's best books." ("Eddie Muller's intro to "Lady in the Lake" (1947) on TCM Noir Alley")
"Montgomery hired another writer, Steve Fisher and coincidentally Fisher and Chandler were both part of the bull pen at Black Mask magazine in the '30s. In Hollywood, Fisher adopted the same attitude about his craft he had working for the pulps -- make sure everything fits together and don't lose your paycheck on the way to the bank. [...] [Chandler] was insulted that another writer reworked his story which included shifting the action from a hot Los Angeles summer to the Christmas holidays and dropping all the scenes at Little Fawn Lake, the book's best passages. Chandler still demanded he be given screen writing credit until he saw the finished product at which point, he demanded his name be removed. " ("Eddie Muller's intro to "Lady in the Lake" (1947) on TCM Noir Alley")
Robert's personal friend director-screenwriter Delmer Daves was also working on "Dark Passage" at the time and described to his friend how Bogart wouldn't be seen for the first half of the movie, using what Hollywood called "the subjective camera" technique where the audience would see the film through Vincent Parry's eyes. But Jack Warner put the kibosh on the decision and Bogart is seen only a few minutes into the film. The method had not been used since the first few minutes of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Orson Welles even had been in talks to use "the subjective camera" for an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness four years earlier, but RKO couldn't afford the $1 million budget Welles suggested and the idea was scrapped in favor of "Citizen Kane."
"Lady in the Lake is a technician's picture, and as such takes a vital step forward in development of original approaches to screen story-telling," Herb A. Lightman explains in his article "M-G-M Pioneers with Subjective Feature" for the magazine American Cinematographer (1946), Special credit is due the M-G-M camera department, and more specifically to Paul Vogel, A.S.C. Director of Cinematography on this film, for clever handling of the required camera effects. [...]
"Foremost among the many camera problems inherent in the filming of the picture was the unusual amount of camera movement required in order to simulate the active meanderings of detective Marlowe. To accomplish this fluid effect, John Arnold, A.S.C., head of M-G-M's camera department devised an especially mobile camera dolly with sets of independently controlled wheels at either end, much on the order of a fire engine hook-and-ladder. This dolly "walked" through doors, down corridors, and up stairs with great natural facility.
"Fight sequences, in which the detective spars with his assailants and is finally knocked down, demanded an even greater mobility of camera. To meet this need, Arnold designed a special shoulder bracket and brace which he adapted to a standard 400 foot motor-driven Bell & Howell Eyemo. In this way, cinematographer Vogel was able to actually "wear" the camera and spar realistically while doing so. [...] The matter of perspective as highly important in planning the camera approach to "Lady in the Lake." Tests were made with various focal length lenses and it was finally decided that the standard 50 mm. lens gave the most normal perspective. Difficulties relating to depth of field developed when, in certain sequences, it was necessary to show the main character's hands in the foreground of the frame, with strong plot action developing in the background.
"Set lighting, also, presented difficulties not encountered in the average picture. Because the camera had to move so fluidly about the set, very few floor lighting units could be used. Most of the lights had to be mounted overhead, some even being hung by ropes in the center of the set. [...] Summing up the camera problems on the picture, cinematographer Vogel says: "Our biggest headache on a film like this was to accomplish all the required effects without calling the audience's attention to the mechanics of the techniques involved. Everyone working on the picture had to adopt a completely fresh point of view. We had constantly to think in terms of camera."
Even actor-now-director Montgomery was not without his problems. "We had to do a lot of rehearsing," he explained to John Tuska in his book The Detective in Hollywood, "Actors are trained not to look in the camera. I had to overcome all that training. I had a basket installed under the camera and sat there so that, at least, the actors could respond to me, even if they couldn't look directly at me." (Lady in the Lake (1947) - Turner Classic Movies) Montgomery would also record his dialogue in a microphone next to his off-scene director's chair, but in the final dubbing his voice was piped a little louder than the others "in order to make the sound seem closer and more intimate, thus pointing up the subjective effect."
"The Lady in the Lake" finished mid-1946, Montgomery bringing the finished movie into M.G.M. 19 days ahead of schedule. The film was already reviewed by Weekly Variety in November 1946. But M.G.M. executives backed down at the last minute from putting the film in theaters to coincide with the Christmas themes and delayed its release until January 1947 to not "offend" audiences when so high of a percentage included the "family trade." "The Lady in the Lake" premiered at New York City's Capitol Theatre January 23, 1947 but with M.G.M.'s tacked on "happy ending" despite the insisting protestations of both Montgomery and co-star Audrey Totter.
The film earned $1,812,000 in the U.S. and Canada in addition to $845,000 internationally, resulting in a profit of $598,000 and becoming #71 out of the 75 Top Grossers of 1947. T.M.P. of The New York Times lukewarmly reviewed, "This picture is definitely different and affords one a fresh and interesting perspective on a murder mystery. [...] In making the camera an active participant, rather than an off-side reporter, Mr. Montgomery has, however, failed to exploit the full possibilities suggested by this unusual technique. [...] Still, Mr. Montgomery has hit upon a manner for using the camera which most likely still lead to more arresting pictorial effects in the future. Since Raymond Chandler provided the story and Steve Fisher wrote the screen play, one can rest assured that the plot isn't lacking in complications, romantic and otherwise." Newsweek called it "a brilliant tour de force" and Variety describes it having "a novel method of telling the story, in which the camera itself is the protagonist, playing the lead role from the subjective viewpoint of star Robert Montgomery. Idea comes of excellently, transferring what otherwise would have been a fair whodunit into socko screen fare."
Lady in the Lake will be playing on Turner Classic Movies on December 20th at 1 AM CST/2 AM EST
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