“Laura” is a movie exposé of society people that is more awed with them than critical. The ignoble facts it finds—promiscuity, deceit, cowardliness and small-mindedness—are treated with a disinterest that is almost boredom, while it views their wit, fastidiousness, snobbery, splendid clothes and environment with the kind of gaga-eyed reverence that you find in perfume ads. Laura, who is head of a famous advertising agency (acted by Gene Tierney with no other qualities than there are in a fashion mannequin on parade), who is admittedly bound to become the mistress of anybody in pants, who can lie and be as tricky as the next society type in this movie, is nevertheless considered for her gentility as an impossible achievement in glorious womanhood—a career-girl Mrs. Miniver.
The best part of the picture is its description of a Brahmin columnist, named Waldo Lydecker, played with great pleasure by Clifton Webb, whose snobbishness and fastidiousness are about the only facts studied in any detail; his perfumed literary style of talking expresses a lot of auntyish effeminacy and his values get across with some force. But there is the same kind of society-page awe in the way he is treated and a false glorification that is totally impressed with what are actually dime-store book wit and charm, and small-boy behavior. The film is a perfect example of Hollywood’s propensity to glorify every kind of character, from the villain to people who merely stand in the background of Laura’s cocktail parties and dinner engagements. It has to do, among other things, with a refusal to take any kind of fact about a person plain, but to make the fact more special, perfect and of equal importance with everything else in the picture. It is one reason for the absence of unpleasantness in our films; the pleasant fact, when idealized, is only made more pleasant, but idealizing unpleasant facts changes the entire character of the detail.
“Laura” is also a murder film, but its crime is treated romantically, like its people, only more so. Four days after the murder its supposedly murdered woman, Laura, shows up unmarked, and the New York police, the murderer and the plain-American-guy detective (who is acted with as much wood as he has ever been played by a talented actor, Dana Andrews) discover that some other woman’s face was shot off by mistake. Meanwhile the detective has fallen in love with Laura from her picture, and this drives the murderer, who is a former lover and hates to see anybody else handle her, to try shooting off her face again. As a murder puzzle it leaves out most of the clues and hides the rest, which makes the mystery both baffling and boring.
“Laura” has a bareness that is as fabulous as the glass fruit that used to decorate dining-room tables. The heroine is described in a series of moments from her life—getting her hair fixed, having her breakfast in bed, leaning over to say something in a business conference—that are as unnoteworthy as the comments Lydecker makes on each shot (for the one in the business conference, “Laura had an eager mind always”). During the picture she falls in love with four men and out of love with three as unconvincingly as possible, which, compared to the account of the detective’s falling in love with her, is rich and moving. The detective’s love affair consists of some nervous pacing, interrupted by someone’s coming in to say, “MacPherson, you’re acting very strange lately. People are going to think you’re in love.”
Otto Preminger’s directing energetically enters into every part of the film and makes it more obvious and more like tin. He underlines attitudes, like the hard-boiled detective’s talking through a cigarette, that are already in italics. Characters constantly offer trim summations of themselves for the audience like the society lightweight’s, “I don’t know a great deal about anything, but I know a little about everything.” The players’ positions in the scene are often petrified into tableaux, and the few action episodes, like the final murder attempt, are so overtrained that they run off as precisely as ballet-steps. All of this cuts the movie into a minimum of easily recognized ideas and leaves the audience still fewer things to find or judge for itself. As a result it is hard to find anything good in “Laura,” or simply anything.
October 30, 1944