V ARIABLES CONSIDERADAS ALEATORIAS

Robert Montgomery scored one of his major acting triumphs in an unconventional film in which he portrayed a dead professional boxer brought back into the story as a part of the spirit world in the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan. As he returns to earth in a bid to make things right and do some of the positive things he could not achieve in a life cut short in his boxer’s prime, he is aided in his return trip by Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), a distinguished, astute, and thoroughly proper angel.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan was successful enough to inspire a remake with the 1978 fantasy triumph Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty reprising the Montgomery role, but this time as a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League. James Mason, a distinguished British performer like Claude Rains, served as the assisting angel.

Montgomery, president of the Screen Actors Guild and a performer who exuded the dapper style of an executive, possessed a creative daring of an actor looking for challenges.

This desire took him into the realm of directing two interesting film noir projects, both released shortly after the war. Ride the Pink Horse, released in 1947, was filmed in New Mexico and involves an avenging serviceman coming home to make things right in the death of his fellow military mate amid the rugged intrusion of a gang led by mobster Frank Hugo (Fred Clark) while local girl Pila (Wanda Hendrix) seeks to supply assistance.

A period dealing with exploration in the film noir realm provided the perfect oppor-tunity for Montgomery to extend his horizon into the directing field. His versatility would lead him in the fifties to serve as the first television advisor to an American president as he instructed Dwight D. Eisenhower in adjusting on camera to the ways of the new techno-logical tool. This medium would ultimately and ironically serve as a boon to the candidacy and two term presidency of fellow Screen Actors Guild President, governor of California and U.S. president, Ronald Reagan.

Montgomery used a unique camera that no doubt confounded filmgoers of his era.

His leading lady in the film, Audrey Totter, explained in a December 1999 interview that Lady in the Lake revealed Montgomery as a director of gifted creative imagination. Totter, a Joliet, Illinois product, possessed a combative sauciness and energetic sexuality that direc-tors and producers found a plus on screen. She attracted notice in 1946, the same year that Lady in the Lake was released, playing Madge Gorland, the young woman with whom Frank Chambers ( John Garfield) becomes acquainted while fixing her car outside Union Station after putting Cora Smith (Lana Turner) on the train in Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Fireworks erupt between Chambers and Smith later after the latter learns that he has been spending time with Gorland.

The half decade following World War II became a productive professional period for Totter. She almost received the opportunity to star with Burt Lancaster in the 1946 Robert Siodmak noir classic The Killers, adapted from one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams sto-ries. Producer Mark Hellinger became so impressed with Ava Gardner’s screen test, however, that she was offered the part instead of Totter.

“I couldn’t do both The Killers and Lady in the Lake,” Totter explained. “I was delighted with Lady in the Lake, but it would have been great to do The Killers as well. They also wanted me for A Place in the Sun (1951), but Metro didn’t want to lend me out for it. Shelley Winters got the part, and she was great. She got an Academy Award nomination for it [for

‘Best Supporting Actress’]. I would have liked the opportunity to do that part. That was the film version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and my character was the one killed when the boat overturned.”¹⁸

Three 1949 Totter starring vehicles were mentioned along with Montgomery’s film as among those holding special interest for the blonde performer. “I am proud of Lady in the Lake, The Setup, Alias Nick Beal, and Tension,” Totter told her interviewers. “They really are all excellent, and people seem to have responded well to them.”

Asked if there was any one performers with whom she particularly enjoyed working, Totter responded, “I enjoyed working with all the actors and actresses in these films. If I had to name just one it would be Robert Montgomery, since Lady in the Lake was such an innovative film.”

Montgomery did a scene with Totter and “went to the producers” and said, “I want Audrey for this part!” A versatile performer who got her big early break on radio in Chicago, the big city closest to where her roots lay in nearby Joliet, Montgomery knew that the sub-jective camera technique with the scrutinizing focus it provided necessitated a performer who could convey truth and convince the audience of it.

Totter’s first scene as Adrienne Fromsett with Montgomery is a classic. When he is taken aback after believing that he has been contacted by her to sell an article and that she seeks to put him to work contacting the missing wife of her boss (Leon Ames), tempers flare. Montgomery delivers Philip Marlowe’s lines at their most direct and salty, testing Fromsett, who strikes back in kind. All the while the audience sees a romantic tension devel-oping, prompting much of the mutual sniping. Audrey Totter is at her craftiest and most seductive at the same time. Only a performer of skillful versatility could bring off such a delicate balance.

Another challenge lay in the fact that, using the subjective camera approach, the scenes were long.

“Yes, they were quite long,” Totter concurred. “Bob tested five or six actresses for the part, and they had difficulty acting directly to the camera. They began to shift their attention to Bob instead because he was feeding their lines. In motion pictures, you are taught to ignore the existence of the camera, and here you had to treat the camera as another actor.

I was able to do this because of my background in radio. When you did radio, you had the script in your hands, and you spoke your lines to the microphone, not the other actors. I played to the microphone for years, so it was easy to play to the camera.”

Cameraman Paul Vogel mastered the technique that Montgomery, very much in com-mand while directing his first film, sought to achieve. “The cameraman kept his camera on his shoulder,” Totter explained. “It was very unusual, and I had never encountered this technique before. Bob stood right next to the camera at all times. He had his lines to deliver, of course. But everyone had to respond to the camera, not to Bob.”

There was one point to which MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer objected: the scene in which Adrienne got up in the middle of the night, and her hair was tousled. According to Totter, Montgomery exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Mayer, she just got out of bed!”

“When my actresses get out of bed, they look like they just got out of the beauty shop,”

Mayer retorted.

“Not this one!” Montgomery replied.

Totter noted that the director ultimately won his point. Montgomery had a better sem-blance of realism over the perfectionist standard of a studio head wanting to see his actresses look as perfect as possible at all times.

As for the actress’s experience with cinematographer Paul Vogel, she would also appear with him in one of her major roles one year later, in the 1947 release The High Wall, directed by Curtis Bernhardt. She plays a doctor seeking to prove the innocence of a patient (Robert Taylor) who has confessed to a murder. As for Vogel, his camera work was lauded in another challenging work better than a decade after Lady in the Lake, in the 1960 release of the H.G.

Wells novel The Time Machine. That film, in which debut director George Pal exercised his special effects artistry, starred Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux.

Lady in the Lake contained both a prologue and epilogue. Audrey Totter explained that audience preview comments registered concern over not getting a chance to see her kiss leading man and director Montgomery.

“It was not enough for me not to kiss the camera,” Totter explained. “Bob and I thought it was so silly that when we shot our kiss, we couldn’t stop giggling. Someone said,

‘Come on, you amateurs! Do the kiss and get this thing over with!’ Bob did yield on the kiss because the audience wanted it.”

UNIQUEAPPROACH— Robert Montgomery, shown with Lady in the Lake love interest Audrey Totter, both directed and starred in this 1947 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel.