Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, Paul Lukas, and Hedy Lamarr in Experiment Perilous

 Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, Carl Esmond, Olive Blakeney, George N. Neise, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Warren Duff, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Roy Webb. 

Cary Grant was the original choice to play the male lead in Experiment Perilous and Gregory Peck was the second. If the role had gone to either of them, the film might be remembered as more than just the other gaslighting movie of 1944, but it has been eclipsed by George Cukor's Gaslight. The part of the psychiatrist Huntington Bailey went to the stolid old reliable George Brent. Dr. Bailey gets caught up in the drama of the Bederaux family when he has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly dotty Clarissa (Cissie) Bederaux (Olive Blakeney), who tells him she's writing the biography of her brother Nick (Paul Lukas), who has a beautiful wife named Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Bailey is intrigued, but not much more, until a mixup in luggage puts him in possession of one of Clarissa's bags. That, and the enthusiasm of his artist friends Clag (Albert Dekker) and Maitland (Carl Esmond) for Allida's beauty, draws him into the Bederaux circle and arouses his suspicions that Allida is not the mentally fragile woman that her husband and others say she is. When he learns that Cissie has died of a heart attack, he opens her valise and finds the manuscript of her biography and her diary, confirming his suspicion -- and putting him in jeopardy. This is solid melodrama stuff, and director Jacques Tourneur, who directed the Val Lewton romantic horror movies Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), knows just what to do with it. He's hindered a little by an over-complicated screenplay based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, which necessitates a lot of flashbacks and switches in point of view, so the film doesn't proceed as smoothly as it might. But he maintains the right atmosphere as the plot moves to its resolution, which involves literally lighting gas as well as gaslighting. There's a goopy happy-ending coda to the main story that strikes the wrong note for the film, but Experiment Perilous deserves to be known as more than an also-ran.

Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940)

Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X

Cast: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden, Sig Ruman, Natasha Lytess, Vladimir Sokoloff, Edgar Barrier, Georges Revenant, Mikhail Rasumny. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, Walter Reisch. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Film editing: Harold F. Kress. Music: Bronislau Kaper.

Comrade X is one of those "what could they have been thinking" movies. It's a farce about international relations made as Europe was skidding into nightmare. Hitler and Stalin had just signed their infamous pact and the Germans were beginning to bomb London. Although the United States was still officially neutral, it was clear that everything was about to be sucked into a major war. So why make such a silly movie about the love affair of an American reporter and a beautiful Soviet streetcar conductor? Actually, it's quite clear what MGM was thinking: Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) was a hit, and we've got this new star Hedy Lamarr who has an accent, and Clark Gable's available, so why don't we put them in a kind of remake? Walter Reisch, who worked on the screenplay for Ninotchka, can surely come up with some sort of variation on the theme of lovely Russian commie seduced by Western capitalist, and we can get some reliably funny writers like Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer to punch up the dialogue. We can even throw in some of the guys from the cast of Ninotchka that we've got under contract, like Felix Bressart and Sig Ruman. Write a part for a wisecracking dame like Eve Arden and hire a top director like King Vidor, and what could go wrong? Pretty much everything, as it turned out. Comrade X's lampoon of Soviet spycraft and censorship would look rather odd only a couple of years later, when the United States entered the war and found itself allied with the Soviets. The comedy turned sour when references to mass executions found their way into the script. Lamarr is pretty and Gable is virile but they don't really connect. And the plot climaxes with an absurd scene in which the protagonists steal a tank and lead a whole battalion of tanks (pretty obviously miniatures) on a chase that ends with all of them plunging off a cliff. It's as clumsy as that sounds. Hecht and Lederer do contribute a few bright lines: "You can't have a revolution in a country where the people love hot dogs and boogie-woogie." There's some fun in the character bits contributed by Bressart, Ruman, and Oskar Homolka, and in Arden's acerbic asides. But the whole thing feels cobbled together from leftovers and uninspired by original thought.