Irving Kershner (1978)
After a morning in the ophthalmology clinic, I decided to spend the afternoon watching Eyes of Laura Mars on television – better than doing these things the other way round. I’d seen Irving Kershner’s thriller, in which a serial killer stabs his victims through the eyes, once before (decades ago). I don’t think it’s only because I remembered the murderer’s identity that I found the film feeble as a whodunit. It was worth a return visit for other reasons, though.
Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a high-profile New York fashion photographer. Her provocative, kinky images – typically of young women undressed and posed as victims of violence – are increasingly notorious, and reviled by feminists. (The work of Helmut Newton was the real-life inspiration for Laura’s work and Newton actually provided photographs used in the film.) A collection of her work, ‘Eyes of Mars’, is being published and publicised as the killings of women close or known to Laura begin. John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the detective leading the investigation into these crimes, shocks Laura when he shows her police photos of other recent murder victims, whose attitudes in death echo her own images. Laura also experiences veridical visions of her friends’ and associates’ murders, though not of who is committing them. Faye Dunaway’s trademarks – her mask-like beauty and high-strung, breathy neuroticism – serve her well, if repetitiously. The bits of her performance I liked best were the fashion shoots, where Laura is in charge: it’s unusual to see Dunaway in zippy control of a situation. Her playing of Laura’s terrified reactions to her visions, which never amount to more than a spooky device, is less interesting.
There’s a distinct shortage of suspects. The culprit surely can’t be the weak character of Laura’s feckless ex-husband Michael (Raúl Juliá): though Laura, for a while at least, seems unsure if she still ‘has feelings’ for Michael, it’s hard to believe she ever did. It can’t be her scuzzy, ex-con driver Tommy (Brad Dourif), whose conspicuously furtive behaviour has to be a red herring. It can’t be Laura’s agent, Donald Phelps (René Auberjonois), who’s openly gay and therefore (this is the 1970s) a figure of fun – until he joins the list of victims. (Donald’s in drag at the time and we seem meant to think the killer takes him for a woman although René Auberjonois is as obviously en travesti as Dick Emery, doing ooh-you-are-awful Mandy, was walking away from camera.) The killer must be John Neville. Laura first meets him at an exhibition of her work, which Neville dismisses – to Laura, apparently unaware of who she is – as ‘sad’. In Laura’s extra-sensory perception of the second murder, an Alsatian dog barks at the approaching killer on a staircase. She and Neville visit the site of the crime after the fact; the Alsatian kicks up exactly the same fuss at seeing the detective. Laura ignores this. She and Neville fall in love and have an affair.
The cop has to be the killer because the film, with a screenplay by John Carpenter and David Zelag Goodman, is all about Laura and John Neville is the wanted man in her life. Besides, Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is the only one in the film, apart from Dunaway’s, worth attention. With his irregular good looks and ability to be at once sinister and soulful, Jones makes John Neville intriguing and sense (almost) of the split personality that’s finally revealed to explain (1) his crimes and (2) how he’s got into a relationship with Laura. The film’s themes are seeing and not seeing: second sight, love-is-blindness, the gouging of the victims’ eyes, voyeurism. If Laura Mars’s camera is voyeuristic so is that of Irvin Kershner and his cinematographer, Victor J Kemper. If the people who look at Laura’s photographs are peeping Toms, so are the film’s viewers. Making the audience aware of, and uncomfortable with, this complicity is a neat idea but somewhat diluted by the killer’s personality. It’s as if only someone as crazed by childhood trauma and mental illness as John Neville turns out to be could seriously take exception to the eroticisation and/or glorification of violence reflected in Laura’s images.
New York City has a mostly bleak and grungy look here – a world away from the cityscapes of nearly contemporary films as different as Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever. There’s an exciting, well-edited chase sequence – on foot – through the streets. (Michael Kahn cut the picture, shortly after his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg, on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) The film was produced by (among others) Jon Peters, immediately after A Star Is Born. With that abomination still in my head from the previous week’s viewing, it was good to hear Barbra Streisand make an enjoyably impassioned job of singing the power-ballad theme song – ‘Prisoner’ by Karen Lawrence and John DeSautels – over the opening and closing credits of Eyes of Laura Mars.
2 February 2018
