Laura
1944 // USA // Otto Preminger
“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” Otto Preminger‘ s first masterpiece and quintessential film noir LAURA opens with an account of recollection, a voiceover done by the flamboyant, acid-tounged columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb). For any first time viewer, they maybe shocked by the announcement of the death of the film’s eponymous character in the first audible sentence. It strikes a meloncholic ambience, reminiscent of the opening line of Alfred Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940), “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Rebecca was dead before the start of the film and never physically appeared except in the form of painting, and Manderley was the mansion which was eventually burnt down at the end, yet we the audience could only get the sense of death more clearly the second time around.
Conversely in LAURA, the death is announced immediately and the dead advertising executive Laura (Gene Tierney) gets to appear in a hauntingly beautiful portrait and in a prolonged flashback, recounted by Lydecker to detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) as he reminisces how he met the charmingly innocent young Laura andsubsequently assisted her climbing the social ladder. Yet the biggest gimmick, as Preminger himself described, is the surprising twist halfway through the film where “a girl you thought was dead automatically becomes a murder suspect by walking into her own apartment.”
Laura is alive, and the facial disfigured body (killed by a close-ranged shotgun blast) belongs to a fashion model whom Laura’s playboy fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) shared an intimate relationship with. Hence Lydecker‘s voiceover is deliberately misleading, one of the many lie he tells throughout the film, starting from the very beginning when he is introduced to McPherson in his own apartment. Lydecker is also a slyly witty man, he introduces the stand clock during the voiceover while McPherson is admiring various objects in his apartment, the same type of clock he gave to Laura as a present which turns out the murder weapon is hidden inside.
LAURA opens and ends with the image of the clock (an allusion of Lydecker‘s obsessive love to Laura) and Lydecker‘s voice, as at the denouement the camera moves in on the shattered clock face and we hear Lydecker‘s last line in his life, “Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, my love.” Loosely to say LAURA is framed by Lydecker‘s narration, yet we don’t have another voiceover, not even Lydecker‘s, again after the opening. And the film’s prespective clearly turns to McPherson who seemingly falls in love with Laura, or more precisely the image of Laura from the portrait painting and the idea of Laura as told by Lydecker. As Lydecker is dead by the end of the film, and the film’s first line highly suggested a reminiscence of the past from a non-specific time and space, LAURA is largely a “ghosts” story told by the dead, one ghost (Laura) is resurrected while another man (Lydecker) turns to a ghost, thus replacing her place.
Alike VERTIGO (1958), LAURA is about a man’s obsessive love which becomes murderous. LAURA is a mysterious whodunnit film where every suspects and the detective himself gain no sympathy from the audience. As Vincent Price, the actor who played Shelby Carpenter and later achieved stardom in horror films, related how the changing of director from Rouben Mamoulian to Preminger influenced the film, “What Otto added to the film—and none of us could figure it out at first—was the ability to give each one of the characters an underlying sense of evil. Nobody in that picture is normal.” Our suspicion bounces in between Lydecker, Carpenter, Laura’s wealthy socialite aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson) who is suspected to have an infatuation with Carpenter, and lastly Laura herself.
Laura lacks the autonomy of being herself, as David Raksin‘s lyrical haunting theme accompanying her portrait during the opening credits, she’s always a woman created by the association with men, including Preminger who openly addressed the character as a whore. Gene Tierney acknowledged her view, “Their (the audience) tributes, I believe, are for the character—the dreamlike Laura—rather than any gifts I brought to the role.” I think Tierney has understated her effort, nonetheless Laura is a “ghostly” existence with spellbinding appeal to everyman around her. Under Joseph LaShelle’s Oscar-winning cinematography, LAURA is alluring and malevolent at once. I can’t say for sure for female audience, but as a man, “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died and resurrected.”
The Films in My Life (OnCriterion) 
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