George Brent while traveling on a train back to New York meets nice but frightened spinster lady Olive Blakeney and they strike up an acquaintance. He accepts her invitation to visit her posh home in Manhattan and then finds that she's died rather suddenly. That's enough to intrigue Brent, but when he meets the family head Paul Lukas and his beautiful wife Hedy Lamarr that's more than enough to keep him interested in the Bederaux Family.
Hedy Lamarr was now away from the really big studios and on a downward slide in her career that was interrupted somewhat by Samson And Delilah. But she was still putting out some good product as Experiment Perilous demonstrates. This drama set during the Henry James/Edith Wharton period in New York is one creepy movie that presents Lamarr as a frightened, but self controlled woman not knowing what her millionaire husband will do next. A poet George Neise with whom she had an affair has already been done in and she's rightly scared. She reaches to Brent like a drowning woman for a life raft.
Lukas is fresh off his Oscar from 1943's Watch On The Rhine and for a while and really for the rest of his career that Oscar guaranteed him some better character roles. He certainly wasn't a traditional leading man, but he notched above his fellow character players for the rest of his life.
Director Jacques Tourneur kept the atmosphere murky, moody, and creepy not necessarily in that order. Experiment Perilous did get an Oscar nomination for Art&Set Direction for a perfect recreation of turn of the last century New York. And he got great performances out of his three leads and the ensemble cast RKO assembled.
If you are a Hedy Lamarr fan this is one of her major films.
