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Mystery Mania Blogathon: Laura (1944)

March 31, 2019

Directed by Otto Preminger, this classic film noir stars Gene Tierney as the titular Laura, Clifton Webb as her acerbic mentor Walton Lydecker, Vincent Price as her fiancé Shelby Carpenter, and Dana Andrews as Mark McPherson, the detective investigating her murder.

This post is part of the Mystery Mania Blogathon hosted by Pop Culture Reverie, and contains spoilers for the film.

Laura had a somewhat bumpy journey to the screen. Much has been written about the unpleasant atmosphere and tense disagreements both before and during production, with Preminger clashing with the studio on everything from casting to plot, and reports of a difficult initial relationship with his cast. Vera Caspary had written the original story in 1941 – which she then adapted into a play and a novel – and she disagreed vehemently with the changes made by Preminger, who erroneously believed Waldo Lydecker, rather than Laura, was the more interesting character. Even if this were true in earlier incarnations, Preminger eliminated any chance of this when he cast the captivating Tierney to play his lead.

Gene Tierney signed a contract with 20th Century Fox in 1940 after being spotted in a Broadway play by Darryl F. Zanuck himself, and she made her on-screen debut in a supporting role in the Henry Fonda vehicle The Return of Frank James (1940). The two actors would appear opposite one another again in the screwball comedy Rings On Her Fingers (1942), and Tierney’s breakout role in Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943) followed soon after. Today she is often remembered for her statuesque beauty, which, although undeniably true, is somewhat of a shame, as she was a talented and versatile actress who excelled as both screwball comedienne and complicated femme fatale. However, she is best remembered for her portrayal of the eponymous Laura, and her delicate and layered performance is key to unlocking the depths of the character.

The central mystery of the film is Laura herself, although not in the way we are first led to believe. The mystery lies not at the heart of her murder, for she is revealed to still be alive, nor does it concern the murdered woman who everyone assumed was her. Laura herself is the true enigma. She is shaped by the expectations of the men around her, who each have their own mental portrait of who she is to them which mirrors the perfection of the physical portrait of Laura that hangs in her living room. Indeed, the film prompts the audience to draw our own portrait of Laura based on our expectations of the conventions of the genre, in which beautiful women are manipulative femme fatales – particularly in relation to hardboiled detectives like Mark McPherson.

McPherson, who has never met Laura prior to beginning his investigation into what he believes are the circumstances of her death, becomes obsessed and falls in love with her – or rather the idea of her that he has created. This obsession is shared by Waldo Lydecker, who has cast himself in the role of her mentor, determined to shape her into the woman he wants her to be via coercion and manipulation. Her fiancé Shelby Carpenter is chronically unfaithful, including with Laura’s own aunt, who finances his playboy lifestyle in return for his companionship, tolerating his desire for the company of women his own age. For Carpenter, Laura is little more than a possession or trophy, casually cast aside with scant interest in her inner life.

It is telling that the murdered woman dies from a shotgun blast to the face, making it impossible to identify her from her true features. She is anonymous, a female body with no personhood, and although she is not Laura, the two are alike in the way in which they are denied agency and an identity of their own. For who is Laura, truly? Much like her portrait – in actuality a photograph of Tierney smeared with oil paint – her true self remains obscured, and we never get to know who Laura really is. We see her only through the prism of the men around her; even McPherson, who feels he knows her intimately, having read her private letters and diary, is merely projecting his own fantasies onto her. When the unidentified woman is revealed to be Diane Redfern, McPherson immediately suspects Laura, presupposing a jealous woman angle.

The reveal of Waldo Lydecker as Diane’s killer is perhaps unsurprising to an audience familiar with the language of film noir, particularly in a modern media landscape in which the tropes of the genre have been parodied and paid homage to countless times. The barely coded homosexuality of Lydecker, coupled with contemporary views of queerness as perversion, lend a troubling and indirectly sexual element to his obsession with Laura. His infatuation with her is explicitly presented as wrong, but Lydecker wants to own Laura rather than sleep with her. He goes out with a classic trope of the genre, an ‘if I can’t have you, no one can!’ stickup, before being gunned down by McPherson’s sergeant.

Lydecker’s final words – “Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, my love” – are not the heart-rending farewell of a lover. They speak to his obsession with her until the very end, and reinforce the fact that the narrative is centred around Laura, whilst simultaneously not deeply concerning her. We see little of how she feels about the chaos and death unfolding around her, and, much like Carpenter, her inner life is of little concern to us; likewise, we wish to know more about Laura as McPherson does, and see her at her best in a manner reflecting Lydecker. The drama has unfolded independently of Laura’s actions – indeed, she was away in the country for much of the present day events, portrayed only through flashback. She is as much an innocent victim of circumstance as Diane Redfern, who Lydecker shot in the mistaken belief she was Laura. Even though Diane’s murder is solved, we are left unsure what it is about Laura that makes the men in her life behave the way they do, and how she deals with the aftermath of Lydecker’s attempt to kill her, as well as McPherson’s obsession with her.

Laura was released on October 11, 1944, and was a success with both critics and audiences alike. It was soon considered to be a classic of the film noir genre, with a great deal of praise for Gene Tierney’s performance. Vera Caspary wrote in her autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups (1979):

“Who would have thought that a film which for all its elegance, was not expensive, whose stars were not then considered important, would become a box office smash and a Hollywood legend?”

Modern viewers are equally as entranced by Laura as contemporary audiences were when the film was first released; in many ways she is a blank canvas onto which the men around her can project their fantasies and expectations, and the audience along with them. But who is she really, freed from the expectation of others? Preminger left this unsaid, and so the mystery remains.

3 Comments CATEGORIES: 1940s, 20th Century Fox, Blogathon, Film Noir, Gene Tierney, Otto Preminger

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Comments

  1. Robin Franson Pruter says

    April 1, 2019 at 12:07 am

    I read the book but didn’t find it particularly memorable. When people make the absurd claim that the book, whatever it is, is always better than the film adaptation, this is one of the examples I use to contradict that claim.

    I think it’s interesting that the movie makes us believe that Lydecker, who, for me, seems completely, Kinsey 6 gay, is murderously obsessed with Laura. To me, that’s more interesting than sexual obsession.

    Thanks for participating.

    Reply
  2. Le says

    April 12, 2019 at 6:43 pm

    What a wonderful review! I agree that Laura is like a blank canvas and, even though we wish to know more about her, we end up only with our own projections about her in the canvas. You wrote a great analysis about this – to me, the most important part of the film.
    Cheers!

    Reply

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“I suppose you might call me the sophisticated t “I suppose you might call me the sophisticated type. I like to act with dialogue. Not with grunts.”⁣
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Happy birthday to Cary Grant #botd in 1904⁣
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“A woman has just as much right in this world as “A woman has just as much right in this world as a man, and can get along in it just as well if she puts her mind to it.”⁣
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Happy birthday to Carole Lombard #botd in 1908 (pictured July 1938)⁣
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"We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We st "We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I used to whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel, with several red chow dogs to match my hair."⁣
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Happy birthday to Clara Bow #botd in 1905⁣
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#clarabow #silentera #silentfilm #silentcinema #silentstars #precode #classichollywood #vintagehollywood #vintagehollywoodglamour #classicmovies #oldhollywood #oldhollywoodglamour #silverscreen #hollywood #films #film #classicfilms #classicfilm #retrohollywood #goldenageofhollywood #cinema #vintagecinema #goldenage #goldenagehollywood
‪“V stands for Vampire, and it stands for Veng ‪“V stands for Vampire, and it stands for Vengeance. The vampire I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see, I have the face of a vampire, perhaps, but the heart of a feminist.”‬⁣
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‪Happy birthday to Theda Bara #botd in 1885‬⁣
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‪Olivia de Havilland on the set of In This Our L ‪Olivia de Havilland on the set of In This Our Life (1942)‬⁣
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#oliviadehavilland #onset #behindthescenes #filmmaking #classichollywood #vintagehollywood #vintagehollywoodglamour #classicmovies #oldhollywood #oldhollywoodglamour #silverscreen #1940s #hollywood #40s #films #film #classicfilms #classicfilm #retrohollywood #goldenageofhollywood #cinema #vintagecinema #goldenage #goldenagehollywood
‪Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine attend Ma ‪Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine attend Marlene Dietrich’s opening night party at the Rainbow Room in NYC, September 1962‬⁣
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‪“Do you know, people say I am a terrible flir ‪“Do you know, people say I am a terrible flirt. You know what made me that way? American pictures! They show a girl how to vamp!”‬⁣
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‪Happy birthday to Lupe Vélez #botd in 1908‬⁣
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‪“They need you. Without you, they have an emp ‪“They need you. Without you, they have an empty screen. So when you get on there, just do what you think is right and stick with it.”‬⁣
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‪Happy birthday to James Cagney #botd in 1899 ‬⁣
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‪(pictured with Bette Davis on the set of The Bride Came C.O.D, 1941)‬⁣
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‪“Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a pict ‪“Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don't care what happened before. I don't even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing - I'll take it in those fifteen minutes.”‬⁣
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‪Happy birthday to Barbara Stanwyck, pictured celebrating on set of Breakfast For Two, 1937‬⁣
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#barbarastanwyck #onset #behindthescenes #filmmaking #botd #classichollywood #vintagehollywood #vintagehollywoodglamour #classicmovies #oldhollywood #oldhollywoodglamour #silverscreen #1930s #hollywood #30s #films #film #classicfilms #classicfilm #retrohollywood #goldenageofhollywood #cinema #vintagecinema #goldenage #goldenagehollywood

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