Laura (1944)
Starring:
Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson. Directed
by Otto Preminger. Screenplay by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Betty Reinhardt. Based on the novel Laura by Vera
Caspary. Produced by Otto Preminger Run Time: 88 minutes. U.S. Black and White. Drama, Film Noir, Mystery
Any time I have a chance to see a classic
film noir, I will take it. I had heard a lot about this film, though until
recently I had never seen it. Put that down to too many films and too little
time. While Otto Preminger is not one of my favorite directors, I do respect his
work. Laura was a bit of a watershed film for him, setting him up for his peak
years that were to follow its release.
The film opens with narration by Waldo
Lydecker (Clifton Webb), an eccentirc New York columnist who talks about the
weekend Laura Hunt died. Police lieutenant Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) has
come to interview him as part of the murder investigation. Waldo is a
well-known close friend of the deceased and a bit of an eccentric as he meets
with Mark while he’s in the bathtub. Waldo knows Mark from his heroic
battles with gangsters. And it is Waldo’s writing that has brought Mark to
see him. Seems Waldo once wrote about a murder committed by a shotgun loaded
with buckshot, the same way Laura had been killed.
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| Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) is interviewed by detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) while he's taking a bath. |
Telling Mark that he’s interest in writing about the murder, he is allowed to tag along on the investigation. First stop is Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson). Mark is interested in Treadwell’s relationship with Laura’s fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price). While she claims never to have given him money, Mark has evidence that says otherwise.
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| Lydecker accompanies Mark when he interviews Laura's aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson) |
Turns out that Shelby, a charming Southern
gentleman, is already there, having come to Ann’s to escape the press and
police. Shelby says that he and Laura were to be married later that week, but
Waldo insists Laura had cancelled their dinner on Friday night so she could go
to her country home to decide if she wanted to go through with the wedding.
When Mark asks if Shelby has a key to her
country home, he says he doesn’t and accompanies the detective and Waldo to
her apartment to look for it. The
apartment is dominated by a large portrait of Laura. There Shelby “finds” the
key in a drawer that had already been inventoried by the police. Shelby admits
he didn’t want to give him the key in front of Waldo, who accuses Shelby of the
murder.
Later, Waldo takes Mark to the restaurant he
and Laura frequented and recalls how he met her five years earlier. He was having lunch at the Algonquin when he
is approached by Laura, an eager young employee of an advertising agency. Laura
wants Waldo to endorse a pen for her company, and is hurt and disillusioned
when he rudely dismisses her, telling her his lunch was more important than her
career. But he wasn’t able to get her out of his mind and goes to see Laura at
the agency, where he apologizes and agrees to the endorsement. They become
friends, and under Waldo's tutelage, Laura rises in her profession, starting
her own successful agency and moving up in society, but always at his side. She became as synonymous with Waldo Lydecker
as his cane. Two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, the two stay in and listen
to Waldo’s music and listen to his reports.
Although their relationship is purely
platonic, Waldo is jealous of any suitors, and uses both his column and his
influence over her to keep any rivals for her affections at bay. One night, at
one of Ann's parties, Laura meets Shelby, who confesses that his family has
been bankrupt for years. Laura gives him a job at her advertising agency, and next
we see them they are romantically involved.
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| Laura (Gene Tierney) meets Shelby (Vincent Price) at one of Aunt Ann's parties. |
Waldo has Shelby investigated and informs
Laura that her fiancé is seeing one of her models, Diane Redfern. Laura is furious
at Waldo's interference and dismisses the accusations until he produces a gold
cigarette case that she gave Shelby, saying he retrieved it after Diane pawned
it. He infers that Shelby is also seeing her aunt and she feels compelled to
find out. She is furious about seeing them together and gives Shelby back the
cigarette case. Back in the restaurant, Waldo tells Mark that Laura had lunch
with Diane the day of her death and had planned to go to her country home for
a few days, cancelling their usual Friday night together.
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| In one of the more famous shots in the film, Mark is obviously obsessed with a woman he thinks is dead. |
Mark, who is growing obsessed with Laura, returns to the apartment the next night and continues searching through her personal
effects. Waldo stops in and says he knows Mark has secretly put in a bid for
Laura's portrait, and chides him for falling in love with a corpse. After Waldo
leaves, Mark falls asleep under the portrait. He awakens to the sound of
someone entering the room, and looks up to see Laura standing before him.
Laura, who has been isolated in the country, is stunned when Mark shows her a
newspaper story about her "murder." She claims the radio in her
country home wasn’t working. Laura then discovers one of Diane's dresses in her
closet, and Mark concludes that the murder victim, whose face was damaged
beyond recognition, was actually Diane. Mark questions Laura, brightening when
she says she had decided not to marry Shelby, and instructs her not to leave the
apartment or use the phone.
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| Laura returns home from the country to find Mark sleeping in her apartment. |
But as soon as Mark leaves, Laura calls
Shelby, unaware that the police have tapped her phone. Shelby and Laura meet
briefly, and Mark follows Shelby to Laura's country home, where he finds him
removing a shotgun from a rack. Shelby claims that he had brought Diane to
Laura's apartment to talk, but when Diane answered the door and was shot to
death, he panicked and fled. As Mark escorts him out, he checks the radio and
is disappointed to find that it works.
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| Lydecker faints when he sees Laura alive. |
Waldo, who initially faints when he sees Laura is
alive, arranges for a party to celebrate her return. At the party, she asks
Shelby why he went to the cottage, and when he replies that he went to hide the
shotgun, she realizes with horror that Shelby believes she is the murderer. Mark,
who is being pressured by superiors to make an arrest, takes Laura into custody
in front of her guests. After she’s been taken away, Ann makes her play for
Shelby. After questioning her at the police station, he is convinced of her
innocence.
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| Mark takes Laura in for questioning. |
After taking Laura home, Mark searches
Waldo's house while he’s not home and discovers a hollow compartment in the
grandfather clock, for which there is a duplicate clock in Laura’s apartment. When
he kicks it in, he finds that it’s empty, but the discovery sends him back to Laura's
apartment. Waldo is still at Laura's when Mark announces that her gun was
not the one used in the murder.
Resentful of the growing bond between Laura
and the handsome detective, Waldo insults Mark, and Laura coolly sends her old friend
away. Mark examines Laura's clock, which is a duplicate of the one in Waldo's
home, and finds a shotgun hidden inside with two spent shells. He tells Laura
that Waldo killed Diane, thinking it was Laura, and hid the gun in the clock
after Shelby ran out.
Mark tells her that he’ll have the clock
taken in for evidence in the morning. After kissing Laura goodnight, he locks
her in and leaves, and Laura prepares for bed, unaware that Ly has come back
into the apartment through the service entrance. When Mark asks who is tailing
Waldo, he’s told he hasn’t come out. Mark and his men head back up as Waldo
enters Laura's room. He is about to shoot her when Mark and his men break in.
Waldo is shot by the police and, as he dies, says good-bye to Laura.
Looking at the production history of this
film, it’s amazing to think that it actually got made. Director Otto
Preminger’s work on the story predates the film. In 1942, while looking for a
stage production to direct, he became aware of a play written by Vera Caspary
called Ring Twice for Laura. Preminger liked the setting of the story, but, of
course, thought it needed revisions. While Caspary was open to revising the
play, she and Preminger disagreed on the direction it should take. She did a
rewrite with someone else, George Sklar, but ultimately could not find a
producer to back the play.
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| Director Otto Preminger |
Caspary turned the play into a novel, first
serialized in Colliers in 1942 as Ring Twice for Laura and then published the
following year as Laura. 20th
Century Fox bought the film rights to the book. Meanwhile, Preminger, an Austrian born
director, had made a return to Hollywood, following his banishment from 20th
Century Fox by Darryl Zanuck over creative differences while filming Kidnapped
(1938), an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel written by Zanuck
himself.
Preminger had gone to Broadway, where he found
success directing such plays and stars as Outward Bound with Laurette Taylor
and Vincent Price, My Dear Children with John and Elaine Barrymore and Margin
for Error. In the latter, Preminger played the part of a Nazi. Preminger also
took a position teaching acting and directing at the Yale school of drama.
Preminger was offered a part by Nunnally Johnson to play a Nazi in the film The
Pied Piper (1942), a 20th Century Fox production. In need of money,
Preminger accepted. Zanuck was already in the Army, having joined following the
Pearl Harbor attack the previous year.
Thinking he was through with Hollywood,
Preminger was offered a chance to reprise his Nazi role in the film version of
Margin for Error (1943). But when director Ernst Lubitsch had to withdraw from
the film, Preminger managed to persuade interim studio head William Goetz to
let him direct. While the film did not do well with critics or movie goers,
Preminger tried to line up projects while Zanuck was still on active duty.
One of the projects Preminger had lined up
was Laura, which Goetz had let him produce and direct. When Zanuck returned to
the studio, he had not given up on his grudge against Preminger and while he
would forgive him, Zanuck didn’t want Preminger to direct the film. Rouben
Mamoulian, the director of Love Me Tonight (1932) and Golden Boy (1939), was
Zanuck’s choice. Mamoulian had previously directed The Mark of Zorro (1940), Blood
and Sand (1941) and Rings on Her Fingers (1942) for the studio. The latter film
starred Gene Tierney, who was cast as Laura.
Mamoulian and Preminger did not work well
together. Mamoulian started to rewrite the script and the two clashed over
casting. While Preminger had no problems with Tierney or Dana Andrews, he did
object to the casting of Waldo Lydecker. Mamoulian had cast Laird Cregar, who
had been previously cast as a Jack the Ripper type character in The Lodger
(1944). Preminger felt casting him as Lydecker was giving away too much to the
audience who already saw him as a villain. Preminger wanted Clifton Webb, who
had left Hollywood in 1930 to act on stage. At the time, Webb was starring in
Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirits in Los Angeles. Zanuck didn’t want Webb because of
his homosexuality and effeminate mannerisms. But after viewing a filmed
monologue from the play, Zanuck relented.
Filming began on April 27, 1944, but Mamoulian
had trouble with the cast and it showed in the dailies. Zanuck let producer
Preminger take over the directing duties. But Preminger and the cast had their own
rough start. Mamoulian had informed them that Preminger was unhappy with their
work, but once they figured out their working relationship they got along fine.
Production ended on June 29, but Zanuck was not happy with the first cut of the
film. He insisted that an ending be shot revealing that the story was all a
dream by Lydecker.
The film was screened with that ending, but
columnist Walter Winchell told Zanuck that he didn’t understand it and that
Zanuck should change it, so the film ends the way Preminger intended.
Preminger would go onto direct some of the
most controversial films of his day, movies that pushed the limits of the
production code by depicting drug addiction in the Man With the Golden Arm
(1955), rape in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and homosexuality in Advice &
Consent (1962).
The motive in the film is interesting in that Lydecker
and Laura’s relationship was obviously not romantic. The film does not come out
and say Lydecker is gay, but his finicky mannerisms suggest he is, especially
given the day and age the film was made. Without romance, his motive is due to
the injury to his ego that Laura would choose to be in a romantic (read that
physical) relationship with a man, first Shelby and then Mark McPherson, over
their intellectual (platonic) one. How could his protégé choose muscle and
brawn over his brain and friendship?
I have not seen many Gene Tierney films
before. She proves herself to be not only beautiful, but a talented actress.
While Laura may be her most famous role, she did receive a nomination for Best
Actress for her role as Ellen Brent Harland the following year in Leave Her to
Heaven. Laura was not her first time to
share the screen with Dana Andrews, they appeared together in Tobacco Road
(1941) and would so again in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).
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| Gene Tierney as Laura. |
We touched briefly on Dana Andrews in our
review of Ball of Fire (1941), but he was a major star in the 1940’s and 50’s,
appearing in such films as The Ox-Box Incident (1943), The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), While the City Sleeps (1956), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)
and Zero Hour! (1957). (Zero Hour! Is probably best remembered as the basis for
the comedy spoof Airplane! (1980).) Andrews was a good dramatic actor whose
alcoholism derailed his career.
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| Dana Andrews |
Before Laura I believe I had only seen
Clifton Webb in a couple of films, Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Titanic
(1953). In both those roles Webb played characters not too terribly different
than Waldo Lydecker, except they weren’t murderers. Laura, as mentioned above,
marks his return to Hollywood. He had been in very few films in the teens and
20’s and had returned to Broadway in 1930. There he was best known for musical
comedies, so his role as a murderer in Laura was casting against type.
Laura was also a big film in the career of
Vincent Price, establishing him as a character actor. His association with
horror and teen films would come later in his career. He got his start in
Hollywood as a contract player for Universal, in Service de Luxe (1938). He
would work twice more with Gene Tierney in Dragonwyck and Leave Her to Heaven, both
1946. He also appeared in several film
noirs: The Web (1947), The Long Night (1947), Rogues' Regiment (1948) and The
Bribe (1949). He also appeared on radio as Simon Templar in The Saint
(1947-1951), a role Roger Moore would later play on television. He would appear
in the 3D horror film The House of Wax (1953) from director Andre de Toth. He
appeared in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps with Dana Andrews and The Ten
Commandments (1956) for Cecil B. DeMille.
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| Vincent Price would go on to have a career in horror films. |
Price would become known for horror thanks to
films like The Fly (1958) and Fly Returns (1959), as well as a series of films
for Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP), including House of
Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), Tower of
London (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the
Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). During this same time he was
also appearing in AIP’s other big genre, beach movies: Beach Party (1963), Dr.
Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
(1966). He would appear in numerous other horror movies, but might best be
known to some as the narrator on the Michael Jackson music video Thriller
(1983), directed by John Landis. He also worked twice for Tim Burton as the
narrator in Vincent (1982) and Edward Scissorhands (1990). Price would die in
1993.
Judith Anderson, who played Ann Treadwell, is
probably best known for her work in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), for
which she received an Academy nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her
role as housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who torments Joan Fontaine’s character
throughout the film. Best known for her dramatic stage work, she won a Tony
award for Best Actress in a Play for Medea (1948), she would also appear in a
revival of the play in 1982 and was nominated as Best Featured Actress in a
Play for her performance.
All said, Laura is not without its flaws. The
biggest to me is the fact that Mark left the murder weapon in place instead of
bagging it as evidence and then doesn’t stay with Laura or insure her safety, which seems
to be against procedure and an obvious plot device to put Laura in danger,
especially when the real killer is not in custody. That seems like a lazy
rookie move rather than something a seasoned veteran detective would do.
The others are more relationship based:
What’s wrong with Mark’s life that he would fall romantically in love with a
woman he thinks is dead? And what sort
of lack of judgment does Laura, a smart and successful woman, have to have to
be involved with a gold-digger like Shelby?
I’ve seen better film noirs, but I’m glad I
saw this one and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before.
There are some very fine performances even if there are a few plot holes to go
with them.
