As Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) begins the investigation of the assassination of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), writer Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) asks to tag along because, as he says, “Murder is my favorite crime.”
Lydecker is the narrator, but also the spectator of this investigation, who like us, follows McPherson along during the investigation.
But hopefully we have a bit more empathy than Waldo. “I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor’s children devoured by wolves,” he states.
And like almost everyone else in the movie, we fall in love with a dead woman, Laura, who’s not only beautiful, but smart, perhaps the smartest one of them all. Someone else agrees: “I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”
And we wonder why would anybody want to kill her? And who shot her in the face? And what would Laura say if she saw the picture of her corpse in the paper?
“When a dame gets killed, she doesn’t worry about how she looks,” McPherson answers.
But Preminger plays us like a violin in David Raksin’s melodic theme, and it’s not easy to find the answer, especially because many people loved Laura, but many also had reasons to get rid of her. Like McPherson, we “suspect nobody and everybody.”
“Laura” is a fun ride, with plenty of fun dialogue and plot twists, worth many viewings.
The photography is beautiful, albeit often filmed in high key. There are some memorable photographic moments, like Laura being interrogated with two bright lamps, or voyeur Waldo spying from the snowy night. But “Laura” is missing some of the “noirness” of other films in which cinematographer Joseph LaShelle collaborated with Preminger, like “Fallen Angel” (1945) and “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1950).
A bit of trivia: A montage of flashbacks (seen in the Blu Ray edition) where Laura is enjoying many parties was cut from the original release because someone at 20th Century Fox didn’t want to offend US soldiers with extravagant life at home while they were dying fight World War II.
5 stars.
The year 1944 was a milestone in the film noir cycle, the first year to produce a high number of films that would go on to become undisputed classics of the style: Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Phantom Lady, The Woman in the Window, and this film, among others. In Laura, director Otto Preminger brings a high-gloss 20th Century Fox sheen to the noir aesthetic, the visual spotlessness belying the gruesome violence at the story’s center: a shotgun blast to the title character’s face. Police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) just outside her apartment doorway: suspects include her effeminate mentor and admirer Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), her almost-fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), his older mistress and Laura’s aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), and Carpenter’s other love interest Diane Redfern. Through interviews with those in Laura’s circle, McPherson begins to develop feelings for the dead girl, her image romantically preserved in a painting above her fireplace, but these feelings are in for a shock when the plot twists half-way through the film. Elitist and/or homosexual, Lydecker’s unabashed arrogance (“In my case, self-absorption is completely justified”) is fun to watch, while variations on Raksin’s famous, melodic theme, which went on to become hugely popular and was recorded by more than 400 artists, adds a symphonic unity to the production overall. Worth noting is the film’s subtle, ambivalent theme of female empowerment: while Laura’s power in the story appears to come from her attractiveness to men, she was also confident, perceptive, and highly successful in her chosen industry in 1944, a mere 25 years after American women were granted the right to vote.
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