The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Film noir, romance

DIRECTOR

Otto Preminger

WRITERS

Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt (screenplay); Vera Caspary (novel)

STARS

Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb

BEFORE

1940 Tierney makes her screen debut in Fritz Lang’s The Return of Frank James.

AFTER

1955 Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm deals with drug addiction, one of several controversial topics that he will tackle.

1959 In Anatomy of a Murder, Preminger depicts rape more frankly than it had ever been shown in Hollywood movies.

Although it is synonymous with film noir, Laura works best when viewed as a twisted romance. Otto Preminger’s movie plays out as a love triangle within a murder mystery, as New York detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) falls for the title character (Gene Tierney), a beautiful advertising executive apparently gunned down on her doorstep at the start.

McPherson’s investigation checks all the requisite boxes for a gumshoe movie—Laura’s wayward playboy beau, her two-faced aunt, and her overprotective best friend—but Preminger adds a strange, dreamlike quality to the movie. The femme-fatale formula is slightly subverted: Tierney plays Laura as an unwitting siren, unaware of the spell she is casting.

The movie’s witty script still sparkles today, and it features a sumptuous original score by David Raksin, whose main theme became a jazz standard.

Writer Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb, center) and playboy Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) are two of the suspicious men in Laura’s life.

What else to watch: Leave Her To Heaven (1945) ✵ The Killers (1946) ✵ Build My Gallows High (1947) ✵ Anatomy of a Murder (1959)