Movie Review – Laura

Laura (1944)
Written by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt, and Ring Lardner Jr.
Directed by Otto Preminger

I’m currently reading Hollywood: An Oral History by Sam Wasson & Jeanine Basinger. It uses transcripts from people who worked in every aspect of the film industry going back to the early silent era. These transcripts are cut apart and grouped chronologically and by subject. For instance, the chapter I’m in now goes through the departments formed when the studio system was dominant. So we get these figures’ takes on everything from costuming to cinematography to studio personnel. There are chapters on the major studio heads, what each filmmaking house was known for in their heyday, and how the whole profession went from a disposable trend to dominating the planet. 

One significant influence on the direction of American cinema was the films coming out of Germany in the silent era, mainly what is known as German expressionism. These films focused more on their characters’ psychological aspects, allowing the landscape to become distorted as things got more daunting. The cameras would move in unexpected ways. Shadows would overtake the screen, making those thin beams of light all that more thematically important. It was from this filmmaking style, combined with the American love of crime & gangster flicks, that film noir would emerge. These stylistic elements also helped create the horror genre through those early Universal pictures. 

As always, Hollywood looked to the book publishing industry for stories, and in the 1930s, few genres were more popular than hard-boiled detective fiction. The works of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler would become such massive bestsellers Hollywood would have been foolish not to adapt them. It was made more daunting as the Hays Code was, in effect, a censorship board that imposed repressive puritanical standards on the scripts. This meant the original books would be far more explicit & raw, while the films had to walk a fragile tightrope, often implying the worst rather than showing it. Despite that, film noir became one of the biggest film genres of the day, eventually inspiring filmmakers outside the States. Over time, it changed, resulting in neo-noir, contemporary crime movies that combine other genres or simply mix modern sensibilities with the hardboiled.

Laura is one of the most acclaimed of these films. The picture follows NYC police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) as he investigates the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). She was a successful advertising executive killed by a close-range shotgun blast in the doorway of her apartment. McPherson makes the rounds interviewing those people whom Laura was closest to. That includes gossip columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), her playboy fiancee Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), her socialite aunt Ann, and more. The more McPherson learns about the victim, the more he falls in love with the dead woman. It should come as no surprise that David Lynch was heavily influenced by this picture and includes many elements in the television series Twin Peaks. I won’t say which parts, as that would spoil this movie.

One of the key tenets of film noir was a focus on fallible and corruptible protagonists. These are not white knights but men who come to the story with flaws. These flaws, in turn, get exploited by other characters or simple circumstance. Happy endings are not commonly found in these movies, but those bleak conclusions stay with the viewers, encouraging them to reflect on the fickle nature of life and how the world can often seem corrupted and broken down. An important thing to note about Laura is that I always forget who the killer is, and I’ve seen the movie three times now. This does not mean it’s a bad movie; instead, discovering the killer’s identity is unimportant to the film’s larger themes. The Whodunnit just gets us in the door and fades into the background around the halfway mark.

As I said above, film noir often had to obscure “unsavory” things about its characters to get them on the screen. If you look closely, the coding is there. Take Waldo, for instance. He’s played by Clifton Webb, an actor who remained unmarried until his death at age 76. In various interviews and comments, Webb was very coy about his sexuality, never confirming or denying it. He plays Waldo as a flamboyant man, yet the script implies he has a romantic obsession with Laura. This contrast between what a character says and the person they are is at the heart of the entire film. People often present themselves in one way while being someone else entirely. 

Film noir often features a femme fatale, a woman who wants to destroy the protagonist or lead him down a road of ruin. Laura does have a femme fatale, but she does not fit the standard definition and actually proves to challenge our notions. She doesn’t play it as the archetype but is much more unassuming. The men in the film are even more fascinating as they behave like lemmings, making stupid decisions and getting enamored to the point that they sabotage themselves. No one asks them to become obsessed; they make a choice, resulting in self-destruction. 

This is also a film where its leads are much less interesting than its supporting and side characters. I’ve already mentioned Webb’s larger-than-life performance that steals the show. Vincent Price is perfectly cast as a lunkheaded Southerner who loves to be a parasite and coast on others’ success. Price is also an actor whose sexuality was obscured for much of his life. He would be very loud in his support of his daughter’s coming out in the 1970s, and others from his life, after his passing, have stated that he was a gay man who married for PR purposes and was even in a “lavender marriage” at one point. That is when a gay man marries a lesbian woman so they can cover for each other. 

My favorite aspect of this film is centered around the themes of identity & illusion. Laura is a person everyone is talking about, and through their comments, she becomes someone that feels immense. Yet, as we see the real Laura (often through flashbacks), she ends up not really being the person they claim she is. Even further, they each see her in a manner different from the others, leaving us to wonder who the real Laura is. The men in her life idealize her to the point that she splinters. There is the real Laura, and there is the imagined Laura, the fictional version that exists purely for the desires of these broken men. 

This is just the first of a dozen noir pictures we’ll watch and review in September. With each one, we’ll look at what genre elements it sticks to and what (if any it pushes back against). This will be a journey into dark territory, where people often end up with far less than they started. Up next is a real exodus into the heart of darkness, Detour.