The villain in Jacques Tourneur's 1944 Experiment Perilous is born a murderer, at least so he says as an explanation for his perfidy. Nick Bederaux's mother died in childbirth and, shortly thereafter, his father committed suicide by leaping off a ship, the Queen of Brazil. In the course of Tourneur's period melodrama (the action takes place in New York City in 1903), Bederaux kills a few more people less circuitously, tries to gaslight his wife into madness, and, ultimately, gets burned beyond recognition. The story is either silly or psychologically profound -- I'm not sure which. Bederaux has married the most beautiful woman in the world only to expose her to various seducers whom he, then, knocks off. It seems that his desire is more for homicide than the charms of his wife and that she exists primarily as bait so that the villain can kill people and claim, however speciously, that his murders are justified. Of course, Bederaux's unfortunate wife is blamed for the killings and, indeed, casts the blame on herself as her husband schemes to drive her mad. Something must have been in the air in 1944 -- the year in which Experiment Perilous was made was also the year in which Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman was produced. Both pictures involve evil men scheming to drive an innocent and naive woman insane. Gaslight was more popular, based I suppose on Ingrid Bergman's star power, and eclipsed Tourneur's subtle, interesting, and ultimately unsuccessful movie.
A physician named Dr. Huntington Bailey (if you end up writing a story with a character with this name, then, you should know that you are Gay) is riding alone on a train during a torrential rainstorm. Black, slimy looking torrents of water pour down off a hillside and flood over the train tracks. Lightning flashes and, when the train crosses a small trestle, the wood beams bend and sag as if made of limp noodles. A small "birdlike woman" is terrified, and, also, perhaps flirtatious. She strikes up a friendship with Dr. Huntington Bailey (hereafter "HB") gripping his arm as the thunder roars. The lady has been in a sanitarium and she doesn't seem wholly sane. The woman mentions her brother, Nick Bederaux and his supernaturally beautiful wife, Allida, played by Hedy Lamarr. She says that Allida seems to be mentally ill and has mysterious admirers who send her daisies all the time. HB is intrigued because he is a psychiatrist and he agrees to visit the little old lady at her family home, described to be weird and unhappy, on the upcoming weekend. But a few hours later, HB receives the word that his interlocutor on the train has suddenly died, seemingly from a heart attack. A friend, nonetheless, encourages HB to visit the family house, a palatial Manhattan brownstone with, at least, three stories connected by lavish stairways. At the party, he meets Bederaux and Allida, who, indeed, exudes some sort of seductive miasma that enchants and entrances all the men around her. It turns out that HB has ended up with the deceased lady's briefcase containing a biography of Bederaux and a diary. HB reads these documents, a device that the film uses to motivate several flashbacks to set up the film's lurid climax. From these flashbacks, we learn that Bederaux has killed one of his wife's previous suitors and seems to be terrorizing their small son -- we hear him telling the child tales of evil witches implying that the boy's mother is guilty of sorcery. Of course, HB falls in love with Allida and plans to rescue her from her evil husband. Bederaux ambushes HB when he comes to extract Allida from the 'house of horrors' and, holding him at gunpoint, harangues the hero, exposes his monomaniacal madness and his plot to kill both Allida and their son. HB attacks Bederaux and the two men fight with fists on a narrow, gloomy spiral staircase, a secret passage connecting Allida's bedroom with the lover level of the brownstone. Bederaux has turned on the gas and lit a cheery fire in a hearth in order to blow everything to smithereens. He fails and HB gets the girl. We see him at the end of the movie on a flowering heath with the little boy and his somewhat spooky-looking mother,
There's nothing special about the plot which seems to me pedestrian. But the great (if uneven) director Jacques Tourneur made this film and it is filled with little details and bits of business that engage the eye and inspire interest. (The film comes after Tourneur's famous stint as the director of Val Lewton horror films such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie; the movie precedes Tourneur's two greatest movies, the brilliant Western Canyon Passage and the iconic film noir with Robert Mitchum Out of the Past). In a department store scene, HB ignores his beautiful mistress as if hypnotized by Allida -- on a suspended wire, a little cage carrying messages passes over the top of the image. The opening scenes of the water pouring as if from a broken dam all over the tracks have a surrealistic edge. Throughout the movie, snow falls in every exterior shot and the picture gives off a palpable chill -- the snow covers sidewalks and characters climb steps frosted in the stuff and a sinister character who stalks the hero stands outside, under a street light, visible against a white pattern of wheel tracks in the fresh fallen snow. At the center of the villain's brownstone, there is a big corridor lined with fish tanks inset in the wall -- of course, at the film's climax the tanks explode releasing a flood of water that rhymes with the flood eroding the railroad tracks at the beginning of the movie. The hero first sees Allida as a painting in an eerie museum filled with ghostly white statues -- the painting has huge staring eyes; it's obvious that this scene influenced Hitchcock's Vertigo in the sequence in which James Stewart goes to the museum and sees a hypnotic image of the dead, beautiful Carlotta who is haunting (it seems) Kim Novak. One of the less important characters is a Bohemian artist and he has sculpted a huge, glaring head of a woman with hair comprised of writhing serpents. The interiors are lavish with forests of Victorian bric-a-brac, busts of gods and ancient heroes, Greek goddesses on pedestals, books in abundance, ancient portraits, dense thickets of stuff -- the set dressing is exuberant and grotesque. The three male characters are all twenty years older that the beautiful Allida and they all have a similar clipped way of talking, clenched lips, and pencil thin moustaches -- you can't tell them apart, a joke emphasized by an elderly myopic lady who mistakes the hero for the villain, or is it vice-versa. There are innumerable punctum in the compositions and always something to see and admire, although the script is a bit pallid at times.
"Experiment Perilous" comes from the Latin translation of words by Hippocrates: Ars longa, Vita brevis, Occasio praeceps, experimentum periculum, iudicium difficile -- that is, Art is long, Life is short, the occasion pressing and experiment perilous: judgment is difficult. Hedy Lamarr acts only with her immense searchlight eyes; she murmurs in monotone and her masklike face is mostly immobile. Although she moves around in the movie, in retrospect I can't recall any images of her in motion -- she seems frozen in place, a victim of the film's plot and her own beauty. She's less animated than the Greek goddess hurled off her plinth by the explosion at the end of the picture.
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