User Reviews

... and what style it has, from its cinematography to its score, to the interesting characters to the well crafted dialogue. However, in many ways it is like "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon", because plot point by plot point it is baffling.

The body of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is found shot point blank in the face, apparently as she opened the door to her apartment. She is an advertising executive who has risen to high society thanks to doors opened by columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who has the opening lines "I'll never forget the weekend that Laura died..". The third main character is a tough New York cop, Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). Mark is instantly smitten with the portrait of Laura that hangs in her apartment. He is so smitten that he seems to forget all rules of evidence and police procedure. He lets a civilian and a suspect himself (Waldo) accompany him on his rounds to question other suspects and he walks all over the crime scene -heck - he practically moves in for a few days, reading Laura's private diary and letters, and drinks heavily, even in the morning, while on duty? Was Frank Drebin of Police Squad his only competition when he was promoted? While he was practically moving into Laura's home he MIGHT have asked why her housekeeper continued to come in every day when her mistress was dead. Exactly who was she cleaning up after and who was paying her? Questions unanswered and unasked.

And everybody in this film is lying their heads off, seemingly to no avail. Vincent Price as the lazy, effete, amoral Shelby is deliciously funny. Why does he lie - twice - about the classical music concert he claims he attended? To what purpose? And the scene where Laura and Waldo burst in on Shelby and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson) having dinner is priceless. In fact, every scene with Price and the wonderful Judith Anderson is both funny and touching. Judith's character really loves this charming skirt chasing gold digger in spite of the fact that she sees all of his flaws. He really should follow her advice and marry her.

Well then, it turns out that Laura is alive, and the very fact that she is alive makes her a suspect too. After all there WAS a killing it just wasn't her! Laura was all mystery and allure when she is just a beautiful portrait with a personality built by Waldo's words and Mark's imagination. However, the real Laura is disappointingly ordinary. Waldo does to some degree seem to be her Svengali, and he does seem to be right when he says that her doom is being attracted to any guy with a good build. Back to the lying - Laura herself lies like a carpet. What's all that nonsense about the radio? It's there, it's not there, it's broken, it's being fixed....who cares? Why does she lie about whether her radio works or not? Meanwhile, once Laura returns, Mark's attention in questioning suspects seems to be focused on whether or not Laura really loves Shelby or anybody else, in other words, does Mark have a shot with her? He acts like a schoolboy every time he gets an answer in the affirmative.

How does this all work out? Watch and find out. I highly recommend this one, just don't get too wrapped up in the plot. Instead, enjoy the atmosphere and dialogue.

As an aside, this was the first time Clifton Webb had been in any film since 1930, when he costarred in a Vitaphone short with radio personality Fred Allen. He refused to do a screen test from Laura's script, but did agree to be filmed doing a scene from "The Blythe Spirit", which was a play in which he was starring. So at age 55, from his single performance in "Laura", Clifton Webb was catapulted to stardom at Fox for the next 15 years.

I'm a huge fan of classic Hollywood. Of all the films I've rated on IMDb (over 7,600 at the time of this review) I think it's safe to say a majority are pre-1960. I rarely find myself in disagreement with the consensus when it comes to widely-praised films from this era. But every once in a blue moon I find myself disagreeing with popular opinion on a classic film, even if it's just a little. Which brings me to Laura. I first saw Laura nearly twenty years ago. Then, and every time I've watched it since, I thought it was okay but was left underwhelmed that it didn't live up to its reputation. I return to it every few years with the hopes I would finally "get it." At this point, I doubt my opinion is ever going to change on this movie. It's one of those movies that leaves me wondering what I'm missing. You know the feeling. You watch a movie and you like it okay but you look around and see everybody else LOVES it. They heap it with praise. I have seen countless movies that I felt this way about, especially recently as every summer blockbuster is heralded as the new king of cinema and skyrockets up IMDb's increasingly worthless Top 250.

The problems I have with this movie start with it being a film built around a mystery that leads to the entirely unsurprising plot twist midway through that Laura is not actually dead. Even if this twist were not spoiled by the plot summary on the back of my DVD and in the TV plot descriptions from TCM, which it is, I would still find it hard to believe anyone is really surprised by it. To make matters worse, the film is not the same after the twist as it was before. The first half of the film is excellent, with the always-wonderful Clifton Webb giving a standout performance as Waldo Lydecker. Dana Andrews is also great up to this point. But then, shortly before Laura shows back up, we're led to believe that McPherson (Andrews) has fallen in love with her. There's no build-up to this. It just happens. Then we get a second half of McPherson acting like a jealous nut instead of the calm and collected police detective he was in the first half.

Okay, there could still be a great film there. Perhaps an examination of the similarities between McPherson and Lydecker. Maybe even making McPherson take stock of his own obsession with this woman and pulling back from the brink. But no, the film doesn't do this. Instead, while Lydecker's crime is exposed and we see how far obsession has taken him, McPherson's obsessive "love" for Laura is treated like a true romance. Laura returns McPherson's feelings and we're led to believe these two wacky kids really are in love. While we're at it, the character of Laura really doesn't seem worth all this attention. Outside of her very pretty face, she's about as interesting as wallpaper.

The film's certainly got some positive qualities. It's beautifully shot, it has a great cast, nice music, and good direction. Gene Tierney is very easy on the eyes. I know I'm in the minority by not loving this film. It's got a great score on IMDb for a film this old. Its reputation has stood the test of time, even if I don't totally agree with it. My final thoughts are that I think it is a good movie, not a great one, that is predictable and uneven with a weak second half. Your mileage may (and probably will) vary, however.

Rashomon-like, Vera Caspary's clever suspense novel Laura falls into five sections and five separate voices, telling its story from the viewpoint of each of its principal characters. It was too cumbersome a structure for a 1940s mystery, so the script (by Jay Dratler and others) simplifies and concentrates the narrative for director Otto Preminger to play with. Judith Anderson as Laura's aunt Ann Treadwell, a vain and silly society dame, and Vincent Price as Shelby Carpenter, a 'male beauty in distress' and on-again, off-again paramour both to Treadwell and to Laura, find themselves demoted to supporting players (if still a couple of satisfyingly kippered herring). Caspary's pentacle gets rejigged into an old-fashioned triangle, with viper-tongued newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and wise-mouthed police detective-lieutenant Mark MacPherson (Dana Andrews) locking horns over the elusive Laura (Gene Tierney). Elusive isn't the half of it. For the first half of the movie, she's presumed dead, her face obliterated by a load of buckshot when she answered the door of her apartment one stifling Friday night in New York City. MacPherson's on the track of her killer and pieces together her story: How through brains and determination (not to mention looks) she rose in the advertising industry, how she met the powerful Lydecker by seeking his endorsement for a fountain pen (first meeting a rebuff on the grounds that he writes with 'a goose quill dipped in venom'), how they became a high-profile, May-December couple in Manhattan society. But to Lydecker's sniffy chagrin, Laura didn't see herself as his exclusive chattel. There were other men: The painter who did her portrait that hangs over her fireplace, for instance (out of spite, Lydecker demolished him in the press), and then the indolent hulk Carpenter. MacPherson learns most of this while interviewing Lydecker in his bath, where the feared and lionized wordsmith fashions his prose on a typewriter perched atop a trestle across his marble tub ('It's lavish but I call it home'). With his imperious – queenly – airs, Webb takes his performance as Lydecker into a rarefied realm that can't have failed to register even in 1944, that of the closeted, elegant gentleman critic using the glamorous Laura as his beard (it's a dimension that was far fainter in the novel). But his full-tilt camping makes his desperate obsession with Laura – if taken at face value – too perfumed a lozenge to swallow. MacPherson's obsession, however, looks like the real McCoy. The testimonials to her beauty, her vibrancy, her elegance start to work on him, until he finds himself holed up at the crime scene – her apartment – gazing at her portrait while drinking himself into a trance (to David Raskin's entrancing title song) and falling asleep in her armchair. (As Lydecker puts it, he's fallen in love with a corpse.) When he awakens, it's to find Laura, come back from the dead – actually from her country place where she's spent the weekend, oblivious to her supposed murder. (The victim turns out to be a model who worked at her agency.) Laura's eerie reemergence reactivates all the tensions and antagonisms slackened, or frozen, by her presumed death. With Laura now among the living, Lydecker finds in MacPherson a more formidable – 'disgustingly earthy' – rival than the penniless playboy Carpenter, while MacPherson finds himself working not on a remote case but seeking the perpetrator of the attempted murder of a woman he's infatuated with (who, since there was in fact a corpse, finds herself a suspect as well).... One of the more perdurable movies of the 1940s, Laura nonetheless remains perplexing. Set in the upper-crust New York of terraced penthouses and chic boîtes and the Algonquin Hotel (where Lydecker's prototype, Alexander Woolcott, held court at the fabled Round Table), it gives off more than a whiff of the Gothic, of tales set on the moors or craggy seacoasts. (Echoes of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca abound, above and beyond the presence of Judith Anderson, as do those of a more contemporary New York story, I Wake Up Screaming). It's a stylish and stylized murder mystery that finds the tangled liaisons among its characters more absorbing than what clues may be hidden inside the grandfather's clock. Those characters have been written off as superficial, and their liaisons as implausible, a point which carries some validity. The making of the movie was troubled, with producer Darryl Zanuck replacing Rouben Mamoulian with Preminger, then clashing with Preminger over his casting of the flamboyantly gay Broadway star Webb. Preminger was a shrewd and worldly man who surely knew how Webb would 'read' even to audiences in the boondocks (not to mention his casting of Price and Anderson, two more actors about whom rumors persist). So there's little getting around the fact that Laura stands as what has come to be called a 'coded' movie, brimming with subtext. But coded how? Preminger saw his movie as less about heterosexual passion gone homicidal than about a superficial culture of celebrity and hype and image. Lydecker's obsession was not so much with Laura's flesh as with fantasy – a rising star to which he could he hitch his jaded wagon. He's a demented fan who fancies that only his own enthusiasm and puffery make her shine. It's the only version of reality that the narcissistic, grandiose Lydecker can accept, with himself as both creator and custodian of her legend. It was the world Laura, too, occupied and enjoyed, if fitfully, a world which she departed for meatier trysts, albeit with lovers who lived in the same fairyland of ritzy illusion. Until she met (and almost too late) MacPherson, a prole without affectation who came to love her as a physical organism rather than as a creature of publicity, a fabulous freak of the zeitgeist. Under a veneer of arch sophistication (aptly captured by director of photography Joseph LaShelle), Preminger found an affirmation of bedrock American values. But he burrowed into that bedrock by the most oblique and unlikely of routes, having himself a great deal of perverse fun along the way. As crafty in his own way as Caspary was in hers, Preminger managed to satisfy wartime ticket-buyers, and he continues to satisfy decadent cinéastes six decades later.

Bit of a change of pace for me here. I spent most of time on the IMDb drawing people's attention to films and TV shows that never got the respect they deserve. Most of the films I review have an IMDb rating which is too low. LAURA on the other hand, currently (as I write this) with a running score in the high 8's, is not a film I would consider under-rated. If anything, the score is just a tad, a touch, a whisker, too high. Here is the skinny: in its day this film was a revelation. Even in its genre, it was a standout. The idea of falling in love with a picture is something you would expect in a fantasy or tear-jerker, not a police procedural or mystery. The audiences that saw it in a theatre were gob-smacked and (with the trick ending which I will NOT discuss) justifiably so. But, the musical question, does it hold up well today? I am not so sure. We are talking about a film where the character playing the hook, the draw, is, for all argument's sake, not actually there. Like John Cleese would say in the infamous DEAD PARROT skit, dead, deceased, no longer among the living. Therefore the film has to be carried by those talking about her. And to this wizened old reviewer, much of those scenes resemble the "living room" pieces in the old Charlie Chaplin films, where the exposition, however interesting, proceeds much like a stage play, with various characters banging lines of dialogue back and forth. If you want to see something from the period which is just as spectacular today as it was then, see PORTRAIT OF JENNIE .. this is not an ad, I don't get a commission if you do, I'm just saying...

I was rather enjoying this movie as I was watching it, but I found myself dissatisfied with the ending, and the more I think about the film, the more flawed it seems to be. My main complaints are plot holes and character inconsistencies.

o Laura is portrayed as a quite intelligent woman. So what does she see in Shelby? Everybody else has figured out this guy is a shallow, lying loser. How does she not see through him? Why hasn't the aunt long since opened her eyes? We know that the aunt sees right through him, and what's more she wants him for herself.

o For that matter, what does she see in Waldo? She hates his cold, arrogant personality at the start, and he does little to hide it the rest of the way. You'd think, gratitude or not, he would have rubbed her the wrong way much, much sooner.

o What on EARTH was Shelby doing fooling around with the model in the first place? He was clearly dabbling with the aunt for the money, OK. He had a sweetheart deal with her, so why was he sacrificing it to marry Laura? The only reasonable answer is that he actually really did love Laura. OK. So what *possible* reason does he have for risking *both* of them to trifle with this poor, unimportant (and not even that great looking) model?

o Explain to me again why on earth he took the model to *Laura's* apartment? And dressed her up in Laura's negligee? And why the model went along with this? This is crucial to the plot yet barely touched on.

o MOST DAMNING: Why, why, why would Waldo go kill Laura (the first time) that Friday night, *when he was on the cusp of victory*??? He already knew that she was going to take the weekend to decide if she was going to break off the engagement to Shelby, and it sure seemed likely that she was going to. All evidence was that he was succeeding in breaking up that marriage, so the "If I can't have her, nobody will!" motive makes NO SENSE!!!

Aside from these plot holes and character inconsistencies, I had three other complaints.

First off, the best moment of the film was completely marred for me by bad film making. That is the moment when Laura comes back and we find out she's still alive. The way the scene was shot, I was *absolutely sure* that this was a dream sequence, and not really happening. It took me quite a while to readjust my thinking and go along with it all being real. And I was still half-expecting it to turn out to all have been a dream, up to the end of the movie. Turns out, I was right. From what I've read, there originally *was* supposed to be an it-was-all-a-dream ending, that was scrapped. Which is fine, the movie is better if she really were still alive and all. But that scene should've been re-shot without the detective falling asleep like that. As it stands, it's just clumsy and confusing.

And then there's Laura herself. She's certainly beautiful. But the character just didn't come off to me as being this amazingly magnificent woman. It's hard to buy why everyone is so obsessed over her. She seems pretty ordinary, frankly. I guess the problem was that she failed to make *me* fall in love with her, and so it didn't resonate with me when everybody else did. I agree with what someone else said, that she worked better as a painting than a character.

Finally, I found the ending disappointing. At the moment that the detective announces he's about to make an arrest, we had a pretty nicely tangled web, with some reasons to suspect every character, yet also reasons to doubt. I actually paused the movie at that point to consider the possibilities. I imagined various combinations of possible conspiracies and alliances between various characters, less obvious motives, surprises. I was hoping for and expecting something much more clever and interesting than just that old-sourpuss did it.

So there you have it. My strongest emotion is disappointment. And the usual bewilderment at the people who gush over this movie. It's a shame, because, handled better, this really could have been an excellent film.

This is film noir played in part as a comedy of manners. (Incidentally, a comedy of manners gets its name from the satirical possibilities in the differing class views on proper behavior--manners--exploited by playwrights to the delight of an audience placed in a superior position--they think--of social discernment. Here we can see the differentials, but they are not played for comedic effect.)

Gene Tierney (at twenty-four) stars as Laura Hunt, a beautiful career girl who, as the picture opens, has been murdered. (Shot in face with a double barreled shotgun, a point of information not dwelled on by director Otto Preminger. Today's directors, of course, would have begun with a full facial shot of the corpse.) Dana Andrews is the leading man, playing Mark McPherson, a hard-boiled police detective with a soft heart. Vincent Price, who before he became a maven of horror, was actually a soft-spoken, hunkish ladies man, plays Shelby Carpenter, who could afford to have his reputation blemished, but not his clothes. He is a man about town who would fit nicely into a British comedy of manners at the turn of the nineteenth century.

But the surprising star is Clifton Webb who plays Waldo Lydecker, venomous columnist and radio personality, who against his first impressions, falls madly (and of course hopelessly) in love with Laura and becomes her mentor. This was before the genteel and very precise veteran of the musical stage was Mr. Belvedere, and before his triumph in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), that is to say, before he was typecast as an irascible but lovable middle aged man--but not before his fiftieth birthday; strange how the fortunes of actors may go. By the way, George Sanders's Oscar-winning performance as the cynical critic in All About Eve (1950), owes something to Webb's work here.

The strength of the movie is in the intriguing storyline featuring surprising but agreeable plot twists, and especially in the fine acting by Webb, Andrews, Tierney and Price. Webb in particular is brilliant. I think this is another example of Otto Preminger getting a lot more out of his actors than he is usually given credit for. See Anatomy of a Murder 1959, starring James Stewart and Lee Remick, for another example. Known for turning commercial novels into commercial movies (e.g., The Man with the Golden Arm (1955); Exodus (1960); Advise and Consent (1962)) Preminger is at his best when he lets the material have its way. I call that the invisible style of directing and he follows it here. Add the beautiful score by David Raksin and this movie is a special treat.

As a mystery however it is a little predictable. We know from the beginning not only who will get the girl, but with a very high probability who pulled the trigger. What we don't know in the first case is how, since she is presumably dead, and in the second case, why. The lack of motive hides the killer's identity from us. But rest assured, all is unraveled in the final reel.

See this for Clifton Webb whose improbable Hollywood success, beginning with this movie, started when he was in his fifties and ended when he was in his sixties. If I were a thirty-year-old actor running to auditions, I would call that inspiration.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

(Spoiler warning at suitable point below) Ah, love and death… I've found myself referencing "Laura" while thinking about so many other films lately (most particularly the excellent Korean thriller "Tell Me Something") that I just have to add my pennyworth, despite being the millionth person to contribute.

The premise: 1940s New York: tough detective called in to investigate a nasty Park Avenue society murder finds himself falling for the victim through her portrait, her things, his contact with those that knew her. One night a startling twist sends him – and the film – in a completely unexpected direction. Don't mistake the brusqueness of style, the punchy delivery and starkness of this film for one-dimensionality. Just as the work of Preminger is greater than the sum of its parts, so "Laura" is more than meets the eye. It owes a lot to the excellent and subversive book by Vera Caspary from which it is taken. (Am I the only one who had no idea women were instrumental in every sub-genre of pulp magazine writing from the 20s to the 50s?) Much of the psychodrama came from the book – but the visual and stylistic tone is pure filmic noir. However, in classic film noir the femme fatale is always the powder keg for everyone around her, and she usually pays for her sin with death. In "Laura" the central death is only the start of the story, not its retributive finale; the 'femme fatale' anti-heroine is really no such thing; and its hero, a portrait of curt masculinity, falls most unusually for an image, an idea.

* * * spoilers from here on * * * This isn't so much a study in police procedure as a study of a man in love. The underrated Dana Andrews' Detective Lieutenant Mark McPherson may seem like a cartoon hard-boiled copper, but look a little harder: his terse, tense, scrutinising detective is a study in the transformative power of love on such a man. From Waldo Lydecker, Laura's friend, we learn that McPherson is damaged – a silver shinbone in his leg as a result of a gun battle with a gangster. He reveals very little of himself – we know him rather from what others say, or by his actions. But his tension, control and intelligence lends an edge to his masculinity. He has ways of looking which speak volumes. His big, sad eyes reflect the bafflement of a man lifted by the love he finds himself experiencing. He plays continually with a baseball toy, to rein himself in. The point – reinforced by a great punch late in the film – is that he has reason to.

The sensual, swooning quality of the theme music is made flesh by the magnetic Laura herself (Gene Tierney). She's not just beautiful – she's like something people dream of. Mark thinks he's dreaming when he wakes to find her standing before him: she's the woman who could make him feel whole. Laura – whom he gets to know, uniquely, from the inside out – is neither a 'doll' nor a 'dame' (his enraging, early words); and in reaching for her he becomes a gentleman, against his own character or background. His 'real' gentleman is in marked contrast to the apparent gentlemen (and Laura's admirers) that we first meet – the acerbic, snippy Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb on great Wildean form), who narrates the first half of the film, and the Southern playboy Shelby Carpenter (an oddly cast Vincent Price). They both turn out to be fakes in a way.

So Laura emerges from her portrait, from her elegant apartment, and from Waldo's museum – his clock, his story, his possession – to become real for Mark. From here on in, it isn't Waldo's world any more, it's hers, and his. I think Tierney takes great credit for "Laura" not merely being the story of a tussle between three men for something they want: she shows you that there's something she wants, too, and that she has the spark and independence to get it.

The extraordinary circumstances of McPherson's contact with Laura lends their connection an intimacy which isn't lessened by the suspicion under which she labours. When Mark makes a move to arrest her at one point, it's almost as if she wants to go; she'd rather be with him under arrest, than listen to Waldo's sniping, or put up with Shelby's lies and lack of faith in her. The moral ambiguity created by these circumstances sets the tone of the piece, creating a sort of swirling, swoony romance with a very dark heart.

"Laura" stands watching and re-watching. For an interesting companion piece, check out Tierney and Andrews a few years down the line (and both incidentally somewhat battered about by life), in another great noir, "Where the Sidewalk Ends". I'd also strongly recommend reading Caspary's original pulp novel of the same name.

In addition to being a fascinating story and a compelling murder mystery, "Laura" employs a technique I've never seen before in a movie. There's a dream sequence in which the dreamer, Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) suddenly wakes up and sees the dead woman who's murder he's investigating. For a moment this viewer, (and I suspect most) found it a little disorienting trying to figure out if the dream is still under way or something more mysterious is about to be revealed. I thought that was just a brilliant way of moving the story forward without resorting to more mundane conventions.

Interestingly, this movie has many Hitchcockian elements without the fabled director's name attached to it. It's a clever noir story that replaces the title character at the center of a murder mystery with a stand-in who we learn about but never see via Detective McPherson's careful analysis. Thinking about it now, one might consider that Diane Redfern's disappearance should have raised a red flag at some point, but the story's compact time frame over a couple of days allows one to overlook it.

Each time I see Gene Tierney, I become firmer of the opinion that she's one of Hollywood's loveliest leading ladies of all time. No wonder her character here held such sway over a variety of men, including the detective who finds himself falling in love with a 'dead' woman. Dana Andrews and Vincent Price are well cast for their roles here, but the real surprise for me was Clifton Webb, a stage actor tapped for the part of columnist Waldo Lydecker, he of poisonous wit and equally poisonous pen. Ultimately, though his revelation as the killer comes across as entirely reasonable, the film crafts an intriguing story in which any of the main players could have been the perpetrator.

Turner Classic film host Robert Osborne calls "Laura" the perfect murder mystery. I don't know if I'd go that far because with a limited number of suspects, one is able to arrive at the same correct conclusion as McPherson. What you do have though is an engaging story and believable characters that make a seventy year old film as fresh as if it were made today.

Empty pleasure.

I thought of ending this review there, but Dana Andrews deserves more.

Laura is a whodunit with a sort of surreal happy ending, and enough twists and pretend twists and twists on twists to make you give up guessing and just watch. It's not such a good thing to have the movie control the facts so that we can't participate in solving the mystery, not really. I know I gave up on this one easier than other people, and for me, the second time, not remembering who did do it, I still gave up on the guessing game.

But there is more here than that, by far. Just start watching as a start. Very smartly staged and photographed (LaShelle, masterfully), and with strong, clean performances, mostly from the demurring detective played by Dana Andrews (better known for his performance in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), watching is easy. The long scene two thirds through, where Andrews is alone in the posh apartment brooding, considering, puzzling, and possibly falling further in love with the dead Gene Tierney of the title role, is a little masterpiece of careful, restrained movie-making. As if to confirm his feelings (and really make the movie perk up), this is where he has a glass of whiskey, falls asleep, and wakes to see Laura standing there like a mirage or an angel. Or a mistake. Laura, the supposedly dead main character we had seen only in flashbacks. From here it takes us on a circuitous wrapping up and we sort of know what will happen, though still don't know how to guess who may have done it.

There might be some issues of confusion not intended--a plot this precise and interwoven begs for nitpicking. Watch the final big party scene with all the suspects gathered, where Andrews accuses, implicitly, Laura herself. Does she panic? No. If she wants us to think she did it (killed the model in her clothes), wouldn't she worry that she would go down by mistake? Isn't the electric chair a lot to risk? And then there is the clock, and Andrews smashing the bottom panel. Shortly later, a replacement panel is perfectly in place. Is this just good police cabinetry? Did I miss something about the second clock (there is an exact match somewhere)? Finally, we would all like to know how Laura could afford such a spectacular (and not very attractive) apartment on her working woman's salary.

No one besides Andrews is especially admirable or evil as a character here. And as actors, no one is especially amazing or awful, either, professional competence begetting the unexceptional. Of note: Vincent Price, a cult favorite, is strained as a chipper disingenuous boyfriend. And potential killer. Clifton Webb, is pretty amazing as a disdainful local writer. And potential killer. His verbal barbs are cutting and hilarious all the way through.

This is a quirky murder mystery, a little cutting edge for its time, and yet without social or psychological compensations. Like a Hitchcock thriller, we have intrigue and surprise, but unlike Hitchcock, there is too much composure and glint. And that painfully recurring theme song, which became a hit. This is somehow a great movie, but a flawed great movie.

Film noir is often associated with the "mean streets" of American cities and its characters are often drawn from the criminal underworld or the impoverished underclass. "Laura", unusually, is set against the background of New York's high society. As the film opens, Mark McPherson, an NYPD detective, is investigating the murder of Laura Hunt, a beautiful young advertising executive, killed with a shotgun just inside the doorway of her apartment. There appear to be two main suspects, Laura's playboy fiancé Shelby Carpenter and her friend the writer and newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker. Her relationships with both men seem to have been very strange ones. Shelby likes to pose as a wealthy Southern gentleman, but in fact has little money of his own. He is effectively a "kept man", being kept by Laura's socialite aunt Ann Treadwell, who nevertheless has no objection to Shelby's engagement to her niece.

It is never really made clear whether Waldo, Laura's mentor and a middle-aged bachelor old enough to be her father, is a purely platonic friend or a disappointed suitor for her affections. As played by Clifton Webb, he comes across as highly effeminate, with a suggestion that he might be gay. In 1944, however, any direct mention of homosexuality would have been a violation of the Production Code, and even a strong hint in that direction might have attracted the unwelcome attention of the Hays Office. The film-makers, therefore, seem to have avoided being too explicit about the exact nature of the Waldo/Laura relationship, leaving open the possibility that he might harbour romantic feelings for her.

It was, incidentally, the characterisation of Waldo which was responsible for the rift between the producer Otto Preminger and his original director Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian had wanted Laird Cregar in the role, but was overruled, and loathed what he saw as Webb's effeminate interpretation of the role. Eventually Preminger persuaded studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to sack Mamoulian and to allow Preminger to direct the film himself.

Roger Ebert wrote of the film that "Film noir is known for its convoluted plots and arbitrary twists, but even in a genre that gave us "The Maltese Falcon", this takes some kind of prize". Ebert was doubtless thinking about the film's Big Twist which comes about halfway through. Up until then we have been thinking that this is a standard whodunit, that the title character will only appear in flashback and that it will end with the identification and arrest of Laura's killer. That, however, is not how matters play out. It is suddenly revealed that Laura is alive and well and that the dead body found in her flat was, in fact, that of another woman. McPherson now not only has to solve a murder but also has to prevent one, as he is convinced that the killer will return to murder the real Laura.

Dana Andrews makes a rather uncharismatic hero as McPherson, and a young Vincent Price is equally unmemorable as Shelby. Gene Tierney, however, is perfect in the title role. It is perhaps not Tierney's most technically demanding part, but someone of her beauty and charisma was needed to explain why Laura has such a hold over all the male characters- not just Shelby and Waldo, but also McPherson, who seems to be in love with Laura even when he believes her to be dead. The best performance comes from Webb- at this stage in his career better known as a Broadway actor than a cinema one- as Waldo, a camp, snobbish, dandyish and ultimately sinister intellectual, described by one critic as "walking through every scene as if afraid to step in something".

Despite its convoluted plot, at times almost incomprehensible and often rather silly, "Laura" has acquired the reputation of being something of a classic. Like some other films noirs, such as Howard Hawks's "The Big Sleep", it is a film one watches less for its storyline than for its general atmosphere, which in this case is one combining luxury with cruelty and sophistication with depravity, an atmosphere heightened by Webb's suavely poisonous acting and David Raksin's fine jazz-based score. 7/10