LAURA: Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox 1944) Fox Home Video
Scratch the
surface of Otto Preminger’s Laura
(1944) and you will discover one of the most fascinating and demented character
studies ever put on film. Owing to Joseph LaShelle’s moody cinematography Laura is oft’ classified as a film noir. Superficially, it has that appeal. But Laura is much more, and, in truth,
does not adhere to the most time honored of noir’s precepts. No, from its
curiously homoerotic opener between a middle-aged dandified fussbudget and
ultra-butch New York City police detective, to its revelation that the supposed
murder victim is actually somebody else, Laura
careens through its lascivious labyrinth of high society gadabouts, shifting
gears and switching genres mid-way to reveal a devious and complex social study
far more captivating than its traditional crime story.
Our heroine,
Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is not the femme fatale, nor is there another
skulking about this moneyed backdrop to unravel her perfect world. Our hero, Det.
Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) inexplicably develops a necrophilia-esque
obsession with the deceased from a portrait hanging in her apartment. Laura’s
closest friend, newspaper columnist and radio commentator Waldo Lydecker
(Clifton Webb) is an imperious coxcomb, more consumed with his Svengali
ambition to take this lowly stenographer and mold her into a lady of culture
and breeding, while Laura’s fiancée, oily gigolo Shelby Carpenter (Vincent
Price) is a manipulative sponge, even as he procures other sexual relationships
along the way – including one with Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith
Anderson).
Yes, Laura is an elegant film. But it defies
its stylized glamour with a misleadingly pockmarked decadence; relishing the
wicked betrayals and venomous duplicities that ultimately lead to murder. Based
on Vera Caspary’s novel, ‘Ring Twice for Laura’, Jay Dratler
and Samuel Hoffenstein’s screenplay retains Caspary’s air of the foreboding
almost from the moment David Raksin’s lush monothematic score fades and we hear
Waldo Lydecker’s solemn voice over declare “I
shall never forget the night Laura died.”
We are
introduced to butch NYPD det. Mark McPherson, coolly admiring the odd menagerie
of art and crystal adorning the great room inside Waldo Lydecker’s penthouse apartment.
At the behest of a disembodied voice calling to him from the next room McPherson
opens the door and enters an even more disturbingly lavish Roman bath with
Waldo, nude and soaking in his tub; a typewriter at his side. The sexual
tension in their initial ‘cute meet’ is hardly subliminal. McPherson’s laconic
grin as he observes the rather bony Lydecker emerging from his bath, tossing
him his fuzzy robe and following his exit into an adjoining boudoir do more
than suggest naughty – if slightly condescending - thoughts. And McPherson ups
the ante by allowing Lydecker to shadow him to his various ports of call in the
Laura Hunt murder investigation.
Their first
stop is Ann Treadwell’s apartment. Ann is cordial at the outset. But when
McPherson’s questions begins to infer a sexual relationship between Ann and
Laura’s fiancée Shelby Carpenter – thus providing amusement for Lydecker as
well as fodder for his column – Ann’s social graces lapse. Shelby appears on
cue, unassuming and very willing to help in any way that he can. But even he
isn’t particularly heartbroken over Laura’s death. McPherson escorts the two
men to Laura’s apartment with Shelby promising to locate an extra key Laura
always kept in the apartment. Unaware that the police have already taken a
meticulous inventory, Shelby plants his key - in his possession all along - and
McPherson wastes no time in calling him out.
Later, Lydecker
and McPherson retire to a light lunch inside Laura’s favorite restaurant and
through a flashback and Lydecker’s voice over we regress to the elegant Miss
Hunt’s first encounter with the austere Waldo inside the Algonquin Hotel’s
dining room. He glibly admonishes her for attempting to gain his endorsement on
a fountain pen, but shortly thereafter arrives at Bullit & Co., the ad
agency she works for, to reconcile their differences and agree to the endorsement.
Since the flashback is told entirely from Lydecker’s perspective we have
absolutely no way of knowing whether or not it is the truth. Yet, it seems
unlikely that the ambitious Laura would allow herself to be so easily
manipulated by Lydecker’s ascorbic wit – even if his endorsement of the pen is
basically responsible for launching her career.
McPherson
decides to drive out to Laura’s cottage in a perilous thunderstorm. But once
there, he again encounters Shelby attempting to cover up what he perceives is a
clue; the whereabouts of a rifle that might be the weapon used to shoot Laura
Hunt in the face. Curiously, McPherson does not arrest Shelby, but instead
allows him his freedom, returning alone and even more perplexed to Laura’s
Manhattan brownstone. Lydecker accuses McPherson of compromising the case by
having fallen in love with a corpse. But McPherson admonishes Lydecker for his
liberties, and thereafter decides to spend the night in the apartment to come
to terms with his own feelings about the case. McPherson is startled in the
dead of night by the arrival of none other than Laura Hunt who is equally
perplexed at finding a stranger inside her home.
After his
initial shock and surprise McPherson learns from Laura that she had gone to a
mountain retreat for the weekend – removed from telephones and newspapers and
therefore has been entirely unaware of the maelstrom of inquiry surrounding her
murder investigation. McPherson also pieces together a scenario: that one of
the advertising firm’s models, Diane Redfern was mistakenly shot in the face
for Laura. It seems Diane had been using the apartment at Shelby’s invitation. Determined
to spring a trap on those closest to Laura, McPherson re-introduces her friends
to the resurrected – each suffering their own inimitable startle as a result.
Laura’s devoted maid, Bessie Clary (Dorothy Adams) has a frantic breakdown
while Waldo faints dead away at his first sight of her.
McPherson does
some slick detecting to test the guilt of those closest to Laura, then suggests
that it was Laura who killed Diane Redfern because of her jealousy over Diane
and Shelby’s tryst; a revelation Laura vehemently denies. Back at the police
station McPherson becomes convinced of Laura’s innocence. Returning Laura to
her apartment McPherson exposes his true feelings to her and she willingly
reciprocates. McPherson then tells her to forget all about the case, vowing to
bring the killer to justice. In the
meantime, Lydecker has evaded the police guard standing outside Laura’s
apartment building and sneaks inside through the back way using his own key,
determined to finish off the woman he seemingly cannot live without, yet will
not allow anyone else to possess.
Lydecker
confronts Laura at the point of a shotgun he has been concealing inside a
secret panel in her clock ever since the night of the first murder. But at the last possible moment McPherson and
his fellow officers burst into the room. Lydecker fires off a round, missing
the police but destroying the clock he once gave Laura as a gift – an exact
replica of the timepiece in his apartment. The police open fire and kill
Lydecker; his bittersweet words of farewell whispered to her as he expires. It
is interesting to note that Otto Preminger does not conclude the film with
McPherson’s gallant rescue and passionate embrace of the emotionally terrorized
Laura, but instead pans to a close up of the clock; its time piece destroyed,
its inner workings revealed, just as Lydecker’s insidious deceit and jealousy
have also been exposed by his twice failed assault on Laura.
Nominated for
5 Academy Awards and winning one for its cinematography, Laura is a sublime who done it. Yet, like the narrative
complexities revolving around the discovery of who murdered chauffeur Sean
Regan in John Huston’s The Big Sleep
(1946) the ‘who’ in Laura is of far
less importance or even significance than the ‘why’. Waldo Lydecker: the sophisticate – powerful,
popular, successful cultural mandarin of his time, disseminating acidic charm
and razor-backed wit to millions of sycophantically adoring fans while hobnobbing
among the hoi poloi. Waldo; so obvious in his sexual predilection toward men
rather than women and more likely become jealous of McPherson’s steely-edged,
rough and tumble masculinity. Why should this man wish to destroy two lives
(Laura’s and his own) with her murder? True enough, Waldo regards Laura Hunt as
his personal property – a stylish consort he helped sculpt for a king from the
raw materials of an inexperienced ingénue: not for a cop or even a gigolo. Yet,
surely the platonic nature in their relationship thus far has not escaped him. Not
Waldo Lydecker – a man of sphinxlike infallibility.
What of our
hero, the square-jawed and equally square-shouldered hunk du jour, Mark
McPherson; slowly devolving in his unflappable powers of deduction from an
inexplicable affectation for the presumed dead woman he has never met? McPherson,
the stolid good cop who experiences ephemeral glimpses of utter elation only
twice in the film: once when he learns from Laura that she has decided not to
marry Shelby Carpenter, then again after his interrogation of her leads to the unequivocal
conclusion that Laura Hunt could not have murdered Diane Redfern. McPherson is
investigating a murder, not the woman who has miraculously come back from the
grave. Yet, she has possessed him from the beginning, even taken over where otherwise
cool logic ought to have prevailed.
And then there
is Ann Treadwell – the devilishly clever socialite, perfectly satisfied to
remain the object of sexual and financial exploitation until her niece takes a fleeting
romantic interest in the same destructive man – Shelby Carpenter. In one of
Laura’s most revealing sequences, Ann confronts her niece in the powder room;
unapologetically outlining the rather tawdry reasons why she, and not Laura,
must wind up with Carpenter in the end.
Finally, there
is the title character of Laura to consider – the outwardly glamorous, though
hardly fatal vixen: mere veneer for an otherwise forthright, if ambitious, though
completely honest and utterly hard-working lady of substance. In spite of
Lydecker’s promotion of the pen, Laura is self-possessed. She has seen through
both Carpenter and Lydecker’s façades. Moreover, she is her own woman; not to
be managed or manhandled or even worshipped by a lover, but respected and loved
for herself with whomever she ultimately choses for herself; an undeniably
progressive approach to the 1940s Hollywood heroine.
Otto Preminger’s
stroke of brilliance in Laura is that
he never takes sides with any of these characters. Traditional fare of this ilk
and vintage always clearly delineated the righteous from the evil. But
Preminger makes no judgment call on any of the goings on or peccadillos exposed
throughout this story. Instead, he charges the audience with enough
sophistication to read between the lines, to quietly observe and make their own
assessment of each character’s motives and reactions. And from a purely empathetic perspective, we
do just that. Consider this: that Waldo Lydecker – despite his flawed obsession
to control Laura Hunt – is never entirely despised for it; that Mark McPherson’s
personal involvement in the murder investigation never leads us to conclude he
has compromised his moral principles or even his police ethics for the sake of
his own carnal lust; that Ann Treadwell’s need to steal Shelby from her own
niece is predicated on conflicted ideals that strangely enough seem high-minded
and sincere – albeit, in a very insincere way. Preminger makes us aware that
each character is neither entirely pure of heart nor destructively evil. These characters are merely – and occasionally,
very tragically – flawed.
In the final
analysis, Laura is a seminal
masterwork of melodramatic magnificence whose influence in American movies can
be extrapolated in everything from Leave
Her To Heaven (1945) and Vertigo
(1958), right up to L.A. Confidential
(1997) and The Black Dahlia (2006).
It is a peerless film noir – if one chooses only to regard it as such – and an
extraordinary glimpse into the pitted willfulness of self-destructing lies,
treachery and deceit.
Fox Home Video
gives us a handsome Blu-ray indeed; dual layered with a solid bit rate and
remarkably clean transfer. Laura’s
original camera negative has long been lost and previous DVD incarnations were
very gritty, somewhat dark and riddled with age related artifacts. All of these
shortcomings have been corrected on the Blu-ray. In fact, it becomes apparent immediately
following the 20th Century-Fox logo that the print master in this
restoration is different. David Raksin’s emblematic Laura theme had always begun rather abruptly following the Fox
trademark, the result of several frames missing at the start of the main title.
Now, we get a very smooth fade up and transition – as it should be.
The gray scale
has been impeccably rendered: the B&W image considerably brighter than I
expected. Never having seen the film on
film I cannot say with any degree of certainty that this is how Laura looked back in 1944. But if
contrast has been artificially boosted, the results are not detrimental to the
overall presentation. In fact, Laura’s
visuals are clean, sharp and very solidly represented. There remains an
occasional blip of edge enhancement here and there – nothing terribly
distracting on the whole, but noticeable nonetheless. Overall, there will be no
complaints from the cheap seats. Laura
looks fabulous. The DTS mono audio has also been cleaned up to reveal very
delicate sonic textures in the original tracks. Raksin’s iconic underscoring
has never sounded more vibrant.
Extras have
all been teleported over from the DVD and include two distinct audio commentaries:
from Fox historian Jeanine Bassinger, the other from Raksin – who has
remarkable recall. We also get two
A&E Biography Specials (with their A&E Biography intros lopped off):
one on Gene Tierney, the other on Vincent Price. Finally, there’s a fabulous
piece on ‘the obsession’ of Laura in
which contemporary historians and film makers affectionately wax about the
influence of the film. We also get a theatrical trailer. Bottom line: very
highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
4
VIDEO/AUDIO
4
EXTRAS
3.5
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