JimBell Blog

Laura

Under discussion:
Laura (1944)

Under discussion:

Laura (1944)

This movie was probably made well before you were born, but it is a beaut! Although I’m not a film historian, Laura (1944) seems to have been a happy accident. It was a low-budget B movie upgraded to a well-financed A movie. Two prominent musicians turned down the opportunity to score the movie because they did not want to do yet another detective show; but David Raksin realized that the story was actually a romance and scored it beautifully. He scored it so well that most of the movie has no music—he estimates about 35 minutes of score. Raksin’s theme for Laura became so popular that he turned it into a smash hit with words by Johnny Mercer. More than 400 hundred people have recorded the post-movie tune. The movie also had serendipitous casting. Someone gambled on Dana Andrews as the leading man, Detective Mark McPherson, and he had the perfect blend of good looks and edgy vulnerability. Someone gambled on the well-established stage singer and dancer Clifton Webb, and he became, in his first film, the other principal man in the movie, Waldo Lydecker. The movie has many of the complexities and subtleties of a good novel. Take for example the opening scene. The masculine McPherson, who was left with a silver shin after being heroically wounded in a gang-land shoot out, visits Lydecker’s artsy apartment to find Lydecker in the tub typing his renowned newspaper column on a typewriter on a board that swings over the bath. We see McPherson’s slight grimace of disgust at Lydecker’s scrawny old body as the intellectual rises from the water. Although this seems a small and maybe even tawdry shot, the contrast between the two men proves crucial to the entire movie. It is also worth noting that much of the movie is narrated by Waldo, thus naturally diverting suspicion from him as the murderer. Additionally, he is urbane, sophisticated, and detached—not the kind of person to blast his mentee, Laura, with a shotgun. Jean Tierney, one of the few enigmatically beautiful women of the 1940s cinema, is perfect as Laura. Initially, Jean was reluctant to play the part of the woman who starts the picture as a corpse. She said, “Who wants to play a painting? “ referring to the oft-seen portrait above the fire place. After the picture’s success, Tierney said perspicaciously that the furor was not so much for her acting as for the icon of mystery and glamour that was Laura. She described her performance as “adequate,” but, in my opinion, compared to her earlier work, it was excellent. The look of the movie, in black and white, is flawless. Lyall Wheeler was in charge of the art direction. He went on to win so many Academy Awards for Art Direction that I could not list them all. (He was nominated for Laura but did not win.)

This is a classic, and it holds up very well.

Jim Bell

posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 5:34 PM by JimBell

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Windbreaker
Posted Tuesday, March 06, 2007 8:20 PM

Love this flick. Didn't know the history behind the score - interesting.

And I agree with your comment on the 2 men. The viewer is reminded constantly just how different they are.

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