When taking my notes on Otto Preminger's Laura -- something I don't normally do while watching movies, but do in this series so I don't forget any choice noir nuggets in my monthly write-up -- I switched from doing it on my phone, as I had been, to scrawling on a notebook in the dark. I'm not sure if the disorienting nature of my choice caused me to write down less about Laura, but write down less I did.
One of the other reasons I wrote less, though, was that the 1944 film did not scream out "FILM NOIR" to me, even though I know it is considered one of the most illustrative examples of the form. Sometimes I wonder if just having a guy in a fedora and a trenchcoat -- Dana Andrews' appearance for pretty much the entire movie -- qualifies a film as an example of noir.
I guess I consider Laura more of a murder mystery, which I don't think is the same thing as noir. Yes, there's a detective investigating the details of the case, yes there are suspects, yes there are surprises, and yes, I suppose things happen that could qualify as double crosses. Still, noir did not occur to me as the immediate identifying genre assignment for this film, even with Andrews delivering clipped noir patter, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and wearing the hell out of that fedora.
SPOILERS FOR LAURA TO FOLLOW
I suppose I've come to think of noir as being signified most by the presence of a fatale, femme or -- as we saw last month -- homme. Laura does not have such a character, not really, even though the beautiful Gene Tierney certainly looks the part. As a side note, Tierney is yet another iconic actress I am only encountering for the first time this month, though I was certainly familiar with her name, if only because I feel like it should be "Jean" not "Gene." When I think of Gene Tierney I think of this guy:
(That's Lawrence Tierney, known to us young'uns from his role in Reservoir Dogs. No relation, obviously.)
Anyway, it's hard to be a femme fatale in a movie when you are dead from the opening scene. That's why we needed a spoiler alert for Laura, though. Her character is not, of course, dead, but rather, presumed dead because a corpse with a face full of buckshot was found in her apartment, meeting her general description. The casting of Tierney might have tipped audiences off that she wasn't dead, as they would not have needed an actress of Tierney's stardom just to pose for the portrait that hangs in the living room of her apartment, where most of the action takes place. There are a few flashback scenes, but I'm wondering if audiences at the time guessed that she would be returning from the dead before it even happened.
But does she actually return from the dead?
The detective played by Andrews -- Mark McPherson -- falls in love with Laura as he investigates her death, with the portrait serving as a constant catalyst for his increasing affections. At a little way past the movie's midpoint, he falls asleep in an armchair in front of the portrait, and the camera zooms in on him. When it zooms back out, he is awakened by Laura returning to her apartment after a sojourn in the country, where she had gone to consider whether to marry a useless playboy she'd been dating (Vincent Price, showing no signs of his sinister future typecasting).
In today's cinematic parlance, this camera movement would unambiguously indicate that what follows is McPherson's dream. If he has indeed fallen in love with Laura, naturally he would be conjuring a scenario whereby they could still be together, and such a scenario would only be possible in his dreams. Interestingly, the movie never pushes this theory any further than what the viewer chooses to interpret, as the rest of the film plays out realistically as though Laura was really never dead. We've seen this trick enough in modern day, though, that I couldn't help but conclude that this might be the most valid interpretation of the second half of the film.
That ambiguity is probably the most interesting part of the movie for me, and it alone elevates the film. At this writing I think I have to think about it more before I decide whether to give it 3.5 or 4 stars on Letterboxd. Although I was never bored, I did spend a fair amount of time being underwhelmed by Laura, perhaps having built it up in my head a bit because I knew its reputation. Because so much of the action takes place in Laura's apartment, the film does feel a bit inert from time to time in terms of its dramatic action. However, especially if that ambiguity about its second half is intentional, that earns it a lot more points.
Another thing going for it was the clarity of its plot, which I could always follow even though it does contain some twists and turns. The narrative complexity, especially the clumsy narrative complexity of a film like The Big Sleep, has been a big barrier of entry for me in past noirs, and Laura avoids all of those pitfalls. It's clean and it has some really interesting characters, notably the effete writer played by Clifton Webb, Waldo Lydecker, a snob who prefers typing his newspaper articles from his bathtub.
The Waldo Lydecker character is particularly interesting as he starts out as our narrator -- perhaps writing a newspaper column -- but he does not stay in that role throughout the film. In fact, there are a number of scenes where he is not present, so if he's telling the story, he would have no way of knowing what was happening in these scenes. I'm not sure if this is a bit of intentional misdirection on Preminger's part, or more like carelessness. If we're seeing him as an unreliable narrator, that's usually a narrator who is telling us about events at which he or she was present, before we ultimately learn that we cannot trust his or her perspective on those events. Narrating events at which you were not present is a different kettle of fish, and I'm undecided on whether it totally works or not.
One more comment on the cast. It was great to see Judith Anderson appear, even if she didn't make nearly the impression she made as Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca.
In doing a quick search just now related to how widely the second half of Laura is interpreted by its audiences as a dream -- and let's just say there don't seem to be as many people writing about that as I would have thought -- I also hit upon questions about whether Laura herself is considered to be a femme fatale. The conclusion by one particular writer is that yes, but not because she tempts men to their doom. Rather, it's because her presence indirectly causes death. I like that secondary definition of what it means to be a femme fatale, and that has helped Laura settle in better among the other movies I would more clearly define as noirs in this series.
Okay, only two months left on the calendar. Think I've got my final movie in December picked out, now I just have to choose between a half-dozen other finalists for the November slot.
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