Experiment in Terror

More of a director trying on Hitchcockian suspense and seeing how it fits than a film noir, Experiment in Terror strikes curious poses as it lumbers towards its ending. Far too protracted to keep the suspense going, Experiment in Terror in an experiment alright, but mainly one of the “woman imperiled” variety. Much of the story is game of cat and mouse between rigid cop Glenn Ford (who else, really) and psycho killer Ross Martin with Lee Remick and Stephanie Powers functioning as collateral damage and tantalizing bits of temptation.

This would all converge into something better if the damn thing just didn’t drag itself out for so long. At two hours, it can’t justify its bloated running time, and a lot of it loses tension as it feels like wheels spinning in the mud before the eventual showdown. It doesn’t help that Ford’s once again a blank good cop with little antiheroism in him, and he’s outshone by Remick’s petrified bank teller.

There’s nearly something subversive about how Experiment in Terror lays bare the voyeurism of so many crime sagas and psychological thrillers. Remick’s character beomes a mere reactive agent to the men around that willfully throw her into dangerous situations to fight their battles for them. She’s a prop just as often as she’s an autonomous character and you’re tempted to think of all of this as an autodidactic critique of the male gaze and cinematic voyeurism.   

Such egg-headed theories are not to be found, though. Scenes stretch out and wait for a judicious edit that never comes thus robbing them of their potential impact. Remick’s possible arousal over being choked and threatened whimpers more than it moans due to a sense that the scene proper ended and yet there it is, still going. Any deeper points feel buried under the rubble of too much.

Not that all suspense thriller should be 100 minutes or less, some need that extra breathing room just for their sheer narrative heft, but there’s a reason so many of them are lean and mean. It’s better to punch quick, hard, and fast then it is to show off your flashiest moves then spend a lot of time pacing before doing them again. Experiment in Terror would have done well to remember that.