Essentials: Laura

...and Jimmy Stewart also made porn

Year: 1944 (USA)
Genre: Drama/Film Noir/Mystery
Directed: Otto Preminger
Stars: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson
Production: 20th Century Fox

What is film noir? Film critics and snobs (like myself) throw that phrase around like it some kind of well-known, easily defined, internal feature of film history. Those who are casually familiar with film know who were in them; Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Vera Miles, some even know a director name or two. But Humphrey Bogart was also in westerns and Alfred Hitchcock also made comedies and film noir is still a catch-all for black-and-white mysteries with darker themes and brooding main men.

Is Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) a film noir? On it’s surface it certainly is. The yarn starts with a police detective prying into a murder, there are multiple plot twists and a seductive woman in the center of it all. Yet through it all the murder means very little when it comes to the theme and point of  which while subversive are never as dark as Chinatown (1974) or as macabre as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

So you're sayin' I really could save 15% or more on car insurance

Nor does Laura feature a hardboiled detective with a ruddy past or a fatal phobia;
Dana Andrews plays his lieutenant McPherson without a sense of urgency or malice. He’s a flatfoot doing his duty and whose only drive stems from a infatuation with the assumed deceased. Likewise Gene Tierney’s seductress Laura isn’t much of a vamp or naif; stock characters almost necessary for the film noir fold. She’s more of an unwitting victim in a inundation of intrigue.

He also suffers from shrinkage

The main objective of the plot swirls about the two main leads yet it is the supporting characters that are memorable. Clifton Webb was nominated for an Oscar as New York columnist and unconscionable snob Waldo Lydecker. Lydecker plays multiple roles in Laura’s drama playing the narrator, comic relief, the audiences’ thoughts and the seething, bitter sidekick to the lieutenant, at least for the first part of the movie.

Lydecker is also a suspect in the murder case along with society wastrel Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price); fiancée to the distraught Laura. Price was 33 at the time of the film’s release and under contract with 20th Century Fox; well before he found his mellifluous niche as the sophisticated bad guy. In Laura however, Price plays a dolt who looks like the cat who ate the canary.

Laura was also released before this happened

They, along with socialite Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), live in their own reality, made murky by the circumstances of murder. Not because either of the three are the assassins, but because the homicide becomes an excuse to expose their dirty laundry in front of high society and the NYPD. One is embarrassed, another is accustomed to public shaming and the third relishes it.

Its never important

So is Laura still, strictly speaking a film noir? I would say no. While the element of murder is there, the atmosphere lacks the abhorrent juiciness, the principle characters lack anti-hero qualities and the mystery isn’t all that important. Laura is much better categorized as a tense, interesting, witty and insightful murder mystery which exposes deeper meanings about love and obsession. The main characters are almost immediately overshadowed by the supporting cast and the murder holds little emotional weight.

The novel of the same name by Vera Caspary is considered in many circles to be a pre-feminist story as it favorably presents a woman with a healthy professional and sexual life. While much of that was downplayed in the film, much of it shows through. So while it may still be considered film noir by some, at least it makes it less of a boy’s club.

Final Grade: A