Laura

Otto Preminger’s dreamy noir that drags up deeper issues

NOTE — The late, great Roger Ebert said it best: “Film noir is known for its convoluted plots and arbitrary twists, but even in a genre that gave us “The Maltese Falcon,” this takes some kind of prize.” This review hopes to divulge and unpack those convolutions and twists, and therefore: SPOILER WARNING.

As crime writer James Ellroy wrote in his memoir, My Dark Places, “Dead white women always stirred things up.” This much is certainly true. Are there many images more powerful, more symbolic, more captivating than that of a dead woman? Think of the way the drained and mutilated body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short — more commonly known as The Black Dahlia — captured the morbid imagination of America. Not only did the horrifying image of a disfigured young woman precede the mysterious narrative behind it: the image was the narrative. The scars told the story. Not only that, but the story tapped into something within society, displaying it at is most morbid. It proved, once again, that we are all voyeurs — images and narratives of sex and death fascinate us — and it is this dark societal unconsciousness that the noir genre, and its literary predecessor the hardboiled crime novel, has always hoped to tap into. These sprawling, webbed narratives are just as interested in depictions of mankind’s propensity for darkness as they are in the act of looking at such acts.

Though a writer like Ellroy used the tragic image of a beautiful and well-acquainted aspiring young woman as a way to descend into a perverse fantasy of murder with all its gothic trimmings— arguably to an outrageous and misogynistic fault — Otto Preminger, the director of 1944’s steamy noir classic Laura, uses it instead as a jumping-off-point to explore more interesting issues surrounding the death of the eponymous young woman. This is Preminger’s greatest trick. He invites us into the wickedly mysterious homicide case of Laura Hunt but instead places us within the subjectivity of the film’s cast of characters, through which we not only learn the tragic story of the woman at the story’s heart, but also those that extended their tendrils into her life. In this sense, it is the ultimate act of voyeurism. We are allowed complete privilege of the investigative eye.

At the cynical heart of Laura is of course that murder — a murder investigated by Manhattan detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), in which he meets Laura’s arrogant best friend, fork-tongued gossip columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and her creamy drip of a fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), who both make up the fabric of obsession that the detective soon finds himself enveloped by, falling in love with the dead woman — but this elegantly structured and transcendent noir is not a simple whodunit. Though the film leads us, like McPherson, into this false sense of security with its lulling pace and carefully composed storytelling, to see it as such is to do a disservice to the script, beautifully woven by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, and based on Vera Caspary’s novel and play. The murder, and its subsequent investigation, is merely a starting point — a temporary stage — for which a web of intrigue and manipulation spun by those who knew the deceased is played out. Everything feels staged and artificial: a knowing, and telling, touch on the arm as a character departs a room could be as revealing about their intentions as it suggests. We are being led from the audience, onto the stage, and through a lie. There is a trapdoor on that stage through which McPherson, and the viewer, falls into the nest of vipers that is the upper crust of mid-twentieth-century Manhattan — a world often depicted in classic noirs, such as Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956). The uncovering of the mystery is not so much as interesting as the exposure of the cast of characters that adorn it, and subsequent critique of society and its desire to project their conceptions of ideal femininity onto the blank slate of a beautiful young woman.

Preminger picks at this glamorous world of dreams and aspirations like a scab. In a world run by expensive men, how does a woman survive? He chooses to open his film with the grand portrait of Laura, a portrait that often looms above the narrative’s proceedings, always lurking in the background. This perfectly frames Laura’s most biting remarks on objectification and forced femininity. It is a theme that is written right through it like a stick of rock. “You’re not yourself, darling”, remarks the insidious fop Lydecker, but of course Laura has never really been herself: she’s a blank slate to be written on by others. By men. In this regard, Laura is a comedy of suitors passed through the nightmarish lens of the noir genre, and Laura’s suitors are an identity parade of varying, yet equally sleazy, male types.

Despite being the eponymous character, we never truly know ‘the real Laura’. She is perhaps one of the most prominently passive characters in all of cinema. And this is exactly Preminger’s intention. Laura, as a blank slate, is merely a projection screen upon which Preminger projects the exposed intentions of the film’s cast of male characters. Rather than learn about Laura we learn a whole deal more about the masculine structures that seek to ensnare her.

It is these structures that even the ‘hero’ of the story, detective McPherson, isn’t spared from being a part of. “I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse”, taunts Waldo, as it becomes apparent that McPherson is just another man who has become entranced by Laura Hunt’s beauty. The rough-around-the-edges investigator McPherson falls for the ‘dead’ Laura on the basis of the alluring portrait that is drawn up for him by the ferocious fops and idiots that offered up their affection to her. Laura Hunt is the name on everyone’s lips, the image in everyone’s mind. McPherson eventually comes to his senses breaking free from the vapid chains that have tied him and his fellow males down, and rather than solving the case — a case that is built upon a bed of lies — he saves Laura from falling deeper into a decadent world of masculine perversion. Not only is Laura resurrected in the mind of detective McPherson, then ‘literally’ resurrected upon the reveal that she is still alive, but resurrected at the film’s climax from the depths of ritzy Manhattan. Preminger’s vision of noir goes mythic, as McPherson adopts the role of an Orphic hero, braving the depths of the underworld to save his love from death. This is his saving grace and redemption, and allows the noir to finish on an uncharacteristically positive outlook.

Ultimately, what elevates Preminger’s dreamy noir above the pack is that it is ‘about something’. The noir genre is a genre embedded within its own pulpy roots, evolving out of the hardboiled crime literature genre, which itself evolved out of pulpy magazine tales of sex and death. Thinking of the greatest noirs of all time — Double Indemnity (1944), The Third Man (1949), even Chinatown (1974)— they stand out because they are all about something. Though they come with all the conventions and trappings of the classic Hollywood noir — though often subverted to a degree — they all have a powerful and emotional heart that drives their seductive narratives. Laura is just another of those films that made certain the noir genre was never forgotten. Not only does it explore something about that sleazy Manhattan world, but it explores something about the noir genre within which it is situated. And on a deeper level, the real-life issues that accompany murder: more often that not, female murder. Ideas that inspired the genre in the first place. In a sense, Preminger deconstructs the genre, placing us within that subjectivity that fuelled the genre’s rise. He draws our minds back to those powerful images of dead girls that inspired the dark and twisted narratives; dead girls that are trapped within the minds of men, mere vessels for their desires.