Laura: Preminger’s noir where a detective falls for the portrait of a dead woman

A woman’s portrait hangs over a Manhattan apartment, lit like an altarpiece, and a homicide detective who never met her sits beneath it night after night until he is, unmistakably, in love. The woman is dead — shotgunned at her own front door before the story begins. Laura opens on that absence and turns it into the most elegant obsession in American film noir: a murder mystery in which the hardest thing to solve is the investigator’s own heart.

Detective Mark McPherson is handed the killing of Laura Hunt, a glamorous advertising executive, and reconstructs her from the people who claimed to love her — the waspish columnist Waldo Lydecker, who made her career and can’t forgive the world for sharing her, and the soft, faithless Southern playboy Shelby Carpenter, her fiancé. Each one remembers a different Laura. McPherson, sifting their lies in her empty rooms, falls for the version that stares down from the wall. Then, past the midpoint, the film detonates the twist that made it famous, and the love story curdles into something stranger.

The look and the sound

Otto Preminger took the picture over after Rouben Mamoulian was fired, reshooting most of it, and the result is deceptively serene — long gliding takes, deep pools of shadow, a camera that drifts through Laura’s apartment like a guest who won’t leave. Joseph LaShelle’s black-and-white photography won the Academy Award, and you can see why: every surface is silvered, every face kept half in darkness. Over all of it floats David Raksin’s theme, a melody so insinuating it became a jazz standard once Johnny Mercer added a lyric, and is now inseparable from the word Laura itself. The music does what the dialogue can’t — it makes the audience fall in love alongside the detective.

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The people in the frame

Clifton Webb, in his first major screen role at fifty-four, walks off with the film as Lydecker: every line a poisoned bonbon, every glance a verdict. Vincent Price, years before horror claimed him, is wonderfully weak as the kept man Shelby; Judith Anderson watches them all with predatory patience. Gene Tierney is less an actress here than an apparition — the film needs her to be unknowable, and her stillness obliges. Dana Andrews underplays McPherson into a slab of granite that only slowly cracks. None of them strains for greatness, which is exactly why the ensemble breathes.

What keeps Laura modern is its frankness about desire as a kind of haunting. McPherson courts a memory, a painting, a case file; the film understands that he is in love with his own idea of a woman, and it never quite lets him — or us — off the hook for it. That undertow of necro-romantic longing, dressed in penthouse manners and witty cruelty, is the picture’s real subject. The whodunit is almost a pretext.

Why it still earns the score

It is not flawless. The plot’s machinery creaks, the resolution arrives in a hurry, and the leads are icons before they are performers. Those limits keep it just shy of the very top tier. But few films from the studio era cast a longer shadow: the National Film Registry preserved it, generations of critics have circled its mystery, and the theme still plays in rooms where no one remembers the movie. Laura proved a murder story could really be about how we love the dead — and made it look effortless.

Laura was released in 1944, directed by Otto Preminger from Vera Caspary’s novel, photographed by Joseph LaShelle and scored by David Raksin. It stars Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price and Judith Anderson, runs 88 minutes, and won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) from five nominations.

Tags: film noir

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