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Mark-149
Reviews
Lady in the Lake (1946)
WHAT were they THINKING of...?
Shatteringly clumsy and agonizingly inept treatment of a Chandler story, totally lacking in style, variety and excitement. First impressions, for once, can be trusted: the disastrous opening scene in which Marlowe sits at his desk and *addresses the camera* gives you an utterly correct impression of the kind of cinematic screw-up you are in for. Next disaster: Robert Montgomery is a wholly uninteresting and un-charismatic actor whose attempts to portray the fast-talking, back-chatting Marlowe frequently come across as merely nasty. Failure Number Three is the ludicrous decision to film the entire story as a series of 'point-of-view' shots, giving us a 'Marlowe's-eye-view' of what little there is to see (Don't miss the bit where Marlowe crawls on his hands and knees - and we see the backs of his hands - before going on to use a telephone - when, gosh, we find ourselves looking at a telephone...). The two-fold pointlessness of the continual P.O.V. beggars belief: first, because it throws the weight on supporting players whose third-rate skills cannot carry it; second, because the fact that we have to watch a series of long, unbroken, unvaried, UNINTERESTING takes - in which whoever Marlowe is talking to simply faces the camera 'square-on' and talks 'back' to it - make vast stretches of the film UNBEARABLY TEDIOUS to watch and the details incredibly difficult to take in. Directors don't cut, employ 'reverse angles', reaction shots, profiles and so on for no reason. Fourth problem: removing Marlowe almost entirely from the visible action removes a lot of useful possibilities and adds PRECISELY NONE. Fifth problem: when Marlowe *is* actually visible, all we see is some lug talking to the camera - whereas a 'voice-over' would at least let us see something *different* happening. And why angle the story as a 'solve-it-yourself' mystery when *everyone* tries hard to work out a Chandler plot anyway? All in all, the results are so abysmal that one asks oneself how it could possibly have come to be done that way. Well, here are my suggestions. First, Bogart is a tough act to follow: by putting Marlowe out of view here, someone must have thought they were avoiding unfortunate comparisons. Second, look who the director is: yes, it's wooden leading man Robert Montgomery, who plainly can't see how bad his direction is when he's acting, and won't see (or hear) how bad his acting is when he's directing. Someone has bitten off more than they can chew - and this is the result: an unwatchable, saggy mess that manages to be significantly less interesting than 90 minutes spent putting your books in alphabetical order.
Day of the Dead (1985)
Life's too short...
To see the way the more pretentious type of commentator discusses 'Day of the Dead' is to realize just how much craziness roams abroad in the critical asylum: though it's paced so badly as to be virtually dead on its feet (excuse the pun), is scripted in a way that would disgrace a first-year writing student, and is acted with desperate incompetence by an F-list cast not one of whom deserves to work again, this almost unwatchable piece of cinematic ordure is routinely discussed as if it contained some kind of artistic substance - a drama of ideas, no less. Add to its other failings a slapdash approach to characterization, utterly basic and unimaginative cinematography, and a numbingly tension-less, supermarket-music score, and no-one except the dyed-in-the-wool gore fanatic and the dead-in-the-head post-modernist will have the remotest idea why anyone ever thought it would be worth making.
Disagree with me if you wish. But don't, please, embarrass yourself by calling this festival of dreck a 'modern classic' until you've tried to watch it - and I mean *really* watch it, all of it - a second time: if it were a film, you'd be able to...
Mark Doran