DIRECTOR: Otto Preminger
Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (a magnificent Gene Tierney in a star‑making performance), a young advertising executive found dead from a shotgun blast just inside her apartment door. His first stop is the apartment of newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb, who became a Hollywood star at fifty), an imperious, effete—read: homosexual—older man who has appointed himself Laura’s mentor and gatekeeper. McPherson also questions Laura’s parasitic playboy fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a kept man tethered to her wealthy socialite aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson).
LIKE MOST OF THE GREAT FILM NOIRS FROM THE FORTIES, THE FILM BEGINS WITH A NARRATION, AND THE NARRATIVE UNFOLDS IN A FLASHBACK
One night, the detective falls asleep in Laura’s apartment beneath her portrait. He awakens to the sound of a key in the lock—and is stunned to see Laura herself walk in. A dress in her closet, belonging to one of her models, Diane Redfern, reveals the truth: the woman assumed to be Laura was Redfern, lured there for a clandestine rendezvous with the unfaithful Carpenter while Laura was away in the country. With Laura alive, the urgency to unmask the killer intensifies.
“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died. 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 with Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her. And I had just begun to write Laura’s story when – another of those detectives came to see me. I had him wait. I could watch him through the half-open door. I noted that his attention was fixed upon my clock. There was only one other in existence, and that was in Laura’s apartment in the very room where she was murdered”
Fade in Narration by Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker
One of the reasons often cited for the firing of the film’s original director, Rouben Mamoulian, was his treatment of Webb—his chilly, dismissive attitude toward a seasoned stage actor whose sexuality he reportedly disdained. Hollywood lore has inflated this into the primary cause of his dismissal, but the more likely explanation is that Mamoulian was steering the material in a direction Darryl Zanuck found untenable. Mamoulian is, after all, more famous for the films he was fired from (Laura, Oklahoma! Cleopatra) than for the ones he completed. Zanuck handed the project to producer Otto Preminger, and the result was a stroke of sheer, unforgettable genius.
Adapted from Vera Caspary’s novel by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt, and an uncredited Ring Lardner Jr., the film features Oscar‑winning cinematography by Joseph LaShelle—trumping even John Seitz’s equally stunning work on Double Indemnity—and a haunting, all‑time‑great score by David Raksin.
REMADE AS SHARKY’S MACHINE BY BURT REYNOLDS IN 1981
