Chapter 4

1944

Laura

DIR. OTTO PREMINGER

The Mona Lisa of murder: Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) is haunted by a portrait of the beautiful Laura.

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,” says newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) at the beginning of the darkly delirious Laura. “A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. I . . . was the only one who really knew her.”

This somewhat overwrought voice-over kicks off what noir expert David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, calls “the most hallucinatory noir ever.” The film follows hapless New York City detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) as he investigates the alleged shooting death of glamorous advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). While exploring the departed woman’s high-society haunts, he begins to fall in love with her—fueled in part by his obsession with her enigmatic portrait.

Directed by Otto Preminger, the film is what critic Roger Ebert called “a tribute to style over sanity.” Strictly speaking, not much in the film makes sense—the detective is accompanied throughout by one of the suspects (Lydecker), for instance, and he never reports to the station. But Laura is much greater than the sum of its parts, all of which are unified by the classic score (the theme song, “Laura,” remains a piano-bar staple).

Then there’s the obvious appeal of Tierney. “I’ve seen the movie 20 times and fall in love with her each time,” Otto Penzler, two-time Edgar Award–winning owner of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop, tells LIFE. “Pretty much every man watching it does, but Lydecker seems more interested in McPherson.”

Sure enough, there is more than a little gay subtext here, fueled in part by Webb’s effete performance in his first starring role. But in Laura, “every character has a so-called ‘perversion,’ a wayward or forbidden desire,” novelist Megan Abbott tells LIFE: “an older woman for a younger, ‘kept’ man; a seemingly closeted gay man playing Svengali to a woman in part so he can vicariously experience her relationships with men; and, foremost, a man’s necrophiliac love for a dead woman. Desire in Laura is never ‘straight’—and we are all, it asserts, fundamentally crooked.”

Above: On the set. Below, star Dana Andrews (left) and director Otto Preminger oh-so-casually consult the 1943 novel on which this noir classic was based. Oddly enough, the novel began as a play called Ring Twice for Laura. Preminger expressed interest in directing it, but felt it needed a major revise. The playwright, Vera Caspary, balked—and turned the play into a novel instead. The film reflects a campy, deliberately theatrical quality and the book’s florid, mannered style: “The day just past, devoted to shock and misery, had stripped me of sorrow,” Caspary wrote in one passage.