Experiment Perilous (1944)

The main benefit of the decision to switch the period to 1903, suggested though not stated by Fellows's description of Allida as "a cloistered and frustrated orchid," is the ability to tap into the subtext of Victorianism. The change strengthens the sexual motifs of the story. Nick becomes the arch-Victorian bourgeios, obsessed with the constant danger of his wife's sexuality and driven to kill in an effort to control it. The Bederaux family is a classic Victorian family with a dark tragic past (the suicide of Nick's father), an aunt who must be locked away for a long period, and a neurotic child.

-- Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur - The Cinema of Nightfall

I've written before about Jacques Tourneur, who is one of my favorite Hollywood directors of the classical era, especially for I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and Night of the Demon (1957). He's relatively obscure (although with many champions, ranging from Kim Newman to Martin Scorsese), so it hasn't been easy to see a lot of his films. Now the Warner Archive, which is slowly making the entire Warner catalogue (including the RKO films they own) available as POD DVD-Rs, has put out a couple of Tourneur films I've been dying to see. Experiment Perilous is the first one I picked up.

This is a gothic romance, woman-in-peril film of a type that Hollywood became fascinated with in the '40s, perhaps most famously in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Cukor's Gaslight (also 1944). Tourneur had just made his name on three gothic horror thrillers produced by Val Lewton at RKO, so this was a natural step for him. To the extent that it is also a story of an overly-sophisticated European wrestling with a down-to-earth American over a beautiful innocent, the French Tourneur brings a complex, self-effacing perspective.



There's a lot going on in the story. As so often in this era of Hollywood, the film has a dense, novelistic feel. (It was based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter.) Tourneur is also an elliptical director who leaves out explanations or proffers conflicting ones. As in his famous film noir, Out of the Past, the narrative is twistingly recomplicated, with historical flashbacks thrown on expository lumps leavened with psychological and philosophical analysis and speculation. Above all, Tourneur was a supreme visual artist, and he creates amazingly textured shots that convey a sense of elaborate, nested spatial, ideological, and social relationships.



The Thomas Elsaesser essay I linked to yesterday does a nice (if academically Freudian) job of delineating the sexual, libidinal struggle at the heart of the movie. It's love and death all the way, baby, and it's as much the death of the male ego as anything else, thus something of a reversal of Tourneur's The Cat People (1942). So it's interesting that after two viewings, the movie it makes me think of most is Last Year at Marienbad. Partly it's the dark, sumptuous, heavy, suffocating, endlessly-articulated decor of the bourgeois mansion where the struggle takes place, but it's also the schematic three-body problem of the threatening husband, the petrified wife, and her pensive, narrating lover(s).



It must also be said that I have just acquired the ability to make my own screen caps, so I'm having to fight the impulse to drown this post in images. Perhaps I have failed to fight it! There are so many arresting images in the film, so many doppelgangers in the form of reflections, sculptures, or manikins. The libidinal struggle is also a struggle over representation. Another similarity with Marienbad is that one of the battles is the battle to establish a narrative. Who gets to tell the story? Who gets to direct? Does anyone actually win such a battle? The happy ending of this movie says yes, at least for today. Yet the screen is haunted with beautiful second thoughts.