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DVD Tuesday: Laura — Love and Death and Film Noir Chills
Laura box art courtesy 20th Century Fox/Fox Film Noir
DVD Tuesday: In love with Laura, smart, ambitious, beautiful... the perfect woman — except that she's dead...
I vividly remember the first time I saw Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), in which cynical, blue-collar detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) catches the case of self-made socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), who was shotgunned in the face when she opened the door to her chic Manhattan apartment.
Against his better hard-boiled judgment, McPherson falls under the dead girl's spell, seduced by her portrait, her letters, her record collection, the faint lingering hint of her perfume, the way she bootstrapped herself from small-town nobody to big-city somebody. And then Laura walks through the door, blithely unaware that she's dead. Laura is, of course, not dead — Laura is a thriller, not a ghost story. But the moment is a mind-boggler.
Based on the 1942 novel by Vera Caspary, Laura is noir at its most bleakly, sleekly menacing, and little-girl-lost Laura Hunt's tale is a stunning parable of the price of using what you have to get what you want, five decades before that phrase became the mantra of pragmatic postfeminist gold-diggers.
Wrapped in the brittle glamour of New York café society, the tale of Laura's chilling corruption by waspish mentor Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a pioneering media manipulator, is as creepy now as it was then. And McPherson's obsession with his dream girl is creepier: In an age of avatars and sim-lives, Caspary and Preminger's vision of media-made virtual tootsies trumping complicated real girls is frighteningly prescient.
Check it out, and then read David Thompson's 1985 novel Suspects, which starts out looking like a collection of clever film-buff biographies of classic film noir characters and gradually reveals an existentially bleak narrative woven from the dark themes connecting 30 years of American thrillers. Laura figures prominently in the mix, and the book is a movie lover's dark dream of a tale.
Things to consider:
What does "film noir" really mean? Is it a style or a type of story, an attitude or something else?
Laura is about a man in love with an image of a woman. Does the 21st century's media-saturated environment make it harder for men and women to deal with the awkward realities of real relationships?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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Nov 20, 2007 10:33 AM
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I am thrilled with this week's pick. Laura is one of the best movies ever made, and is often overlooked by those who insist on color films with chase scenes and pyrotechnics. I appreciate the attention you have drawn to this and the other films you highlight each week. Your column is really a nice change from straight reviews of current films.
Laura is amazing, and not just for the often-copied plot twists (See, for example, Burt Reyonlds' Sharkey's Machine).
The dialogue, much of it from the book, is snappy and eminently quotable.
I don't think Vincent Price ever had a better role and he plays it masterfully - we despise him and feel sorry for him all in the same scene; and Clifton Webb is amazing - as awful as his character is, you never doubt for a minute that with his wit and intellect he could make someone like Laura fall under his spell.
This was also one of Dana Andrews' best roles (right up there with The Best Years of Our Lives) and he, too, is completely believable, as the cop who calls women "dames" but falls hard for the sophisticated Laura.
I think the self awareness of the characters - they each know exactly how phoney they are - has a lot to do with why they are all so interesting.
Thanks again. I haven't seen the film in a few years, but now that you have reminded me of how wonderful it is, I am going to rent the DVD this weekend (it will be a nice alternate to the inevitable holiday season movies the rest of the family will insist on between turkey and football games).
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Nov 20, 2007 1:26 PM
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Well, the two words that come to mind when I think "noir" are cruelty and sex, although they may be employed in different ways and in different doses.
In Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas is a cruel man who will use any trick in the book for glory, fame and reward. Jan Sterling is a vicious woman willing to use her natural sexual charm to get what she wants (money, mostly, and attention).
D.O.A. shows a man working under the cruelest of conditions, his impending death, and with one of the cruelest endings in film.
Blade Runner shows the trials of a "man" living in a merciless future world. Left behind on a depraved rock filled with violence and sex. He eventually finds solace in the arms of a "woman" who is presented to us in a sexually charged manner (those lips, that cig, whew).
In Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers is incredible sadistic. But Max is sometimes worse (other than the attempted murder stuff)! He finds a woman to replace the former Mrs. de Winter. Yes, he's in love, but it has as much with pining for his former wife as his desire for this new one. He expects Joan's character to be able to fit in so easily and wants her to give herself over to becoming the former wife. Just kinda cruel. Redeemed, but cruel.
So these themes keep cropping up. And in different ways. I wouldn't say Bogart's Sam Spade is a "cruel" man. But he isn't saddled by the niceties of polite society. He will do what it takes to get to his goals. That goes to the heart of the hero/anti-hero of a good noir film.
And since this genre came about during times that were very divisive in terms of gender, the men tend to use violence to get what they want while the women use their sexual wiles.
Speaking of Otto Preminger...
Skidoo alert! Skidoo alert! Mark your calendars for January 4th. Skidoo is on TCM! Your best bet? Watch or run away!
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Nov 20, 2007 2:37 PM
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Maitland...A few months ago I saw Laura in its enitrety for the first time. Is there a new DVD release with enough extras to make it worth renting again so soon? I could certainly watch it again anyway but thought I'd check.
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Nov 21, 2007 2:48 AM
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