On a train bound for New York in 1903, George Brent befriends an old spinster returning home after years in a sanitarium. She tells him the story of her well-known family. Upon arrival, Brent finds one of his bags missing and one of hers in its place, containing her detailed diary. Soon after, he learns the woman has died suddenly and finds himself drawn into her family's unhappy saga.
Her brother, Paul Lukas, married a girl (Hedy Lamarr) years his junior; he engages Brent, a physician, to document her loosening grip on reality. But upon investigation, Brent learns that the mental instability nestles elsewhere in the family and he falls in love with Lamarr himself, despite the fact that he feels himself slipping into a treacherous plot.
Released in 1944, the same year as George Cukor's Gaslight, Experiment Perilous too sets a psychological melodrama in a period setting. And it too benefits from elegant direction: Jacques Tourneur's.
Of the handful of directors whose artistry helped produce the noir cycle's most canonical movies, Tourneur remains the most elusive. He seemed to favor no theme or particular style from work to work, rethinking each one from scratch and then crafting it with insight and taste. The Cat People, Out of the Past, Berlin Express, Nightfall these titles have little in common but quality (and perhaps a fondness for the flashback as a narrative tool).
The flashbacks in Experiment Perilous add to the movie's sense of unease and peril (perhaps excessively: the narrative grows murky and the characters don't sort themselves out too clearly). But what Tourneur sacrifices in clarity he makes up for in tension and mood; period dramas tend to have their longueurs but he keeps the story curiously compelling.
He's abetted in his aims by Roy Webb, who supplies a rich and responsive score. (Webb composed the music for many films in the noir cycle including several with Tourneur and remains one of its unsung heroes.) Experiment Perilous, a neglected film, is important Tourneur and important early noir, arriving at a time when the cycle was starting to codify its allusive tone and fragmented narrative patterns. And, except for the fact that Brent and Lamarr are not Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, it's as good as Gaslight in some ways even better, as the root of the psychological malaise turns out to be somewhat darker than old jewels sewn to a gown.
