Otto Preminger (1944)

Otto Preminger’s film noir is an ingeniously structured whodunnit.  Although you want to know who killed the title character, the more you see Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) in flashbacks, the less fascinating she is as flesh and blood – rather than as a crime to be solved, a portrait on the wall, a haunting melody (David Raksin’s theme music is rightly famous).  When it turns out, about halfway through the picture’s eighty-eight minutes, that Laura is alive and well, the surprise instantly obliterates the mild sense of anti-climax that her earlier appearances were building up.  You start to wonder if Laura herself was the killer of the young woman whose corpse was wrongly identified as hers.  It seems for a while that Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), the NYPD detective investigating the murder, is thinking along the same lines – until his apparent suspicion of Laura is revealed as a strategy on Mark’s part to satisfy himself whether or not she’s a femme fatale.  Once it’s clear that she’s not, suspicions turn – or return – to the person who began the film as its narrator before his voice was submerged in the tale he was telling …

There are two central relationships, both involving the heroine:  one is overt but always somewhat puzzling; the other develops under the surface of the film and makes complete sense.  The former relationship is between Laura and waspish, influential New York newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) who, after an initial contretemps with Laura, a career girl in an advertising agency, becomes her social mentor.  The persisting puzzle is how it is Waldo believes that he controls Laura:  she’s very much her own woman from the start; Waldo offends her when their paths first cross and she accepts his apology only after ensuring this will be to her professional advantage.  The first strong hint that Mark McPherson is obsessed with Laura as a woman – even when he still assumes she’s dead – comes as, uneasily fingering a packet of her private letters, he paces around her apartment, its décor dominated by that large painting of Laura on the wall.  Mark’s thoughts are interrupted by the arrival in the apartment of the living Laura; from this point on, the growing mutual attraction between them is undeniable and convincing – and gains momentum from being kept under control.  As well as necessary for the detective to do his job properly, that control is, of course, an expression of what could and couldn’t be shown in Hollywood pictures of the era – and a good example of the dramatic benefits of such reticence.  The same applies, to a lesser extent, to the nature of Waldo Lydecker’s solitariness and platonic attachment to Laura.

The smart, slippery screenplay, based on Vera Caspary’s 1943 novel Laura, is by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt and an uncredited Ring Lardner Jr.  The properly atmospheric (Oscar-winning) cinematography is by Joseph LaShelle.  With one exception, the main cast is first rate.  Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb are both much better than they would be two years later in The Razor’s Edge.  Tierney -amazingly, naturally pretty in the early flashback scenes – seems fully self-realised, along with the woman she’s playing, once Waldo has moulded Laura into a sophisticated beauty.  Webb, not surprisingly, is given plenty to say:  it’s when Waldo is not talking that he uses his face in ways that reveal a more interesting actor than Webb’s distinctive but somewhat samey delivery tends to suggest.  Vincent Price needs more surface charm in the role of Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s playboy fiancé, who’s also a ‘kept man’ – his keeper Laura’s socialite aunt, Ann Treadwell:  as Price plays him, Shelby is merely fatuous.  But Judith Anderson is splendid as Ann (and something of a revelation for viewers who, like me, think of her only as Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1940)).  Best of all is Dana Andrews, who does a fine, unshowy job of blending Detective McPherson’s professional responsibility and emotional involvement in the case.

27 May 2024