Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Experiment Perilous also contains Gothic noir elements in the same vein as
Rebecca, Gaslight and The Spiral Staircase, but in my view is far more puzzling and
unsettling in the sense that it concentrates on the strange suggestibility and eerie movement
of characters suffering from compulsive behaviour. Its opening sequence, taking place on a
train (fig. 97), is evocative of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, as Dr. Huntington Bailey
(George Brent) encounters and befriends a mysterious older woman Clarissa “Cissie”
Bederaux (Olive Blakeney) who offers him her “special brand tea”. The film also uses the
flashback technique quite extensively. One of the most impressive scenes of the film is a
set-piece spectacular gun battle in an aquarium hall, filled with smashed pieces of glass,
surging water and floundering fish, prefiguring the end of The Lady from Shanghai. 95
Figure 97. Experiment Perilous
Regarding Berlin Express, much of its interest rests on the ravishing location
photography of Frankfurt. This was the first American production shot in postwar
Germany, and it shows a city made up entirely of debris. The film is indicative of the
disillusionment that followed World War II, and ultimately reports back to us from the
compelling iconography of a destroyed and decaying society. The shot below (fig. 98)
shows Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan) teamed up with a group of companions, Sterling
(Robert Coote) and Lucienne (Merle Oberon), all US allies, in the overwhelming ruins of
an almost totally destroyed postwar Frankfurt. The various reflective surfaces, the
grotesquerie contained in the plot, treacherous clowns (one scene involves a fatally
wounded man in a clown suit who is trying to pass on fundamental information in front of
95
This particular sequence would later be imitated in films such as Lethal Weapon (1987) and Mission:
Impossible (1996), for example.
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