"When a dame gets killed, she doesn't worry about how she looks."
Otto Preminger offers a high-class thriller with Laura (1944). A mystery tinged with obsession and torment, its brooding atmosphere and misdirection make for an engaging show.Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigates the apparent murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a model with a seedy past. Exploring Laura's story, Mark finds no want of suspects, including radio host Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and playboy Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price). Mark finds himself increasingly drawn to Laura despite the case's peculiar circumstances, a connection further complicated by Laura's reappearance.
Based on Vera Caspary's novel, Laura immerses viewers in upper crust seediness. Its antagonists inhabit swank mansions and elaborate drawing rooms, bleakly cast in Joseph LaShelle's detached camerawork and David Raksin's savory score. Shelby's a dissolute lothario who courts Laura while servicing wealthy Ann (Judith Anderson); Waldo's a near-sociopath who only fakes sentiment. Mere exposure to their world corrupts working class Laura, while Mark's streetwise bluntness casts their mannered perversity in stark relief. Morality requires more than breeding.
Laura focuses equally on the story's sick contours, with unmistakably perverse undertows. Laura's an immaculate beauty who enraptures men (and infuriates women) merely through her portrait. Like Vertigo's Madeleine she bewitches Mark from beyond the grave; when Mark encounters the real Laura, the illusion breaks. She's no glamorous victim but a witting pawn in a murder scheme, fully cognizant of her hold over men. Even so, we can't blame her for Mark, Waldo and Shelby warping her into a fantasy.
Gene Tierney does stunning work. Rapturously beautiful, she alternates between romantic ideal (when framed through Waldo's flashback) and desperate, frantic woman (when exposed to reality) with commendable aplomb. Dana Andrews underplays his role, allowing obsession to bubble up through his two-fisted cop act. Clifton Webb gets all the meaty lines, though Vincent Price's against-type turn as a lover boy is equally amusing. Judith Anderson is fierce and formidable as ever.
Laura blends the class resentment of a melodrama with a film noir's off-kilter undercurrents. In Otto Preminger's hands, the combination is dynamite.
