Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

Glass menagerie

Experiment Perilous isn't the best-known Tourneur and critics of the time compare it unfavorably to Gaslight, with Hedy Lamarr's Allida Bederaux in the Ingrid Bergman role of tormented housewife, Paul Lukas as Nick her husband, and George Brent as therapist Dr. Huntington Bailey, who comes from the outside world seeking to help Allida. 

Easy to see their point; Lamarr tho beautiful isn't in the same calibre as Bergman-- or rather hasn't been given the chance to show her dramatic chops the way Bergman has-- and Brent, who managed to convince Tourneur not just to cast him in this but in The Spiral Staircase a few years later-- doesn't have the charisma of Joseph Cotten. Even saw an online piece that opined the film should have stuck to Lamarr and ignored Brent and Lukas-- in effect Gaslight on a smaller budget with lower-wattage stars.

But Tourneur has been underrated most of his career and remains underrated, even with the recent smoldering interest rekindled in recent years. The film starts with Dr. Bailey on a train meeting the borderline hysterical Cissie Bederaux (Olive Blakeney) both looking forward to and fearing her return home after years in unspecified exile-- her official excuse is that lightning storms make her nervous but one wonders if it isn't the prospect of encountering the psychic storm brewing at home that has unnerved her. She's introduced the main characters (verbally, as Tourneur rarely if ever underlines his points), set the tone of the film (barely suppressed hysteria), and discreetly makes her exit, as if she never existed, or only in Bailey's imagination. 

Then the Bederaux residence, seen first at a party, with guests and husband Nick attending to the oddly spotlighted Allida-- yes it's been pointed out that Lamarr as an actress can be stiffer than Bergman, at times more mannequin than human, but in this context her performance such as it is works-- she's oddly affectless, distant from her fellow human beings, framed and lit like a creature under glass. Along the way Bailey is introduced to the Bederaux aquariums, a series of vast windows into underwater worlds, eerily cut off from us much like Allida is, in slow motion as if experiencing a different time rate (did Alan Moore see this before making that connection of slow time and snowglobes in his Watchmen?).

Letterboxd 'critics' claim it takes too much time at too slow a pace to get to its literally explosive finale but I submit the getting there is the film's main interest-- doesn't help that Tourneur added a flashback where Lamarr (and Lukas) are clearly too old to play the young girl and young man required for the scene (all we have to do tho is think of Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills and wonder if maybe this flashback-- or dream within a dream if you like-- is just Tourneur anticipating Potter by decades). 

We have a beauty under an enchantment; we have the clever warlock who plays cat and mouse games with the beauty's would-be rescuer, Paul Lukas never more smoothly sinister as when he drops little hints and flirts lightly with stolid Brent-- his come-hither cues holding more conviction than any profession of love or jealousy he may have expressed for his lawfully married wife. At times you feel as if Nick dangles his wife before Dr. Bailey like bait, a shiny bright object mesmerizing the psychiatrist, drawing him into Nick's strange world of aquariums and unseen children (Allida's son is heard only as a voice at first, such that for almost half the film we wonder if he even exists). 

It's a delicate dislocated dislocating film such that if you come to it wrong-- as a casual viewer, unreceptive to the tendrils of atmosphere and suggestion Tourneur weaves before you-- you'd be bored stiff. Seen in a different frame of mind it's a fevered dream you can't snap yourself out of till the aquariums burst from their dark wood frames, and you wake to the immediate danger. The finale is standard-issue Hollywood but the field of flowers (an indoor set?) looks and feels so patently fake you wonder if we've only woken from one nightmare to find ourselves in the grip of another, or if Tourneur-- unlike Nick-- isn't quite done toying with you. An underrated gem, I say.