Laura (1944) Review
Dana Andrews as detective McPherson can’t even look at the portrait of Laura - the idea is too much.
There will never be another Laura. But who was Laura? She's made to become all things to all men: and she doesn't exist beyond that. That's the tragedy underneath the noirish police procedural of Laura (1944): Laura is a name which might not stand for anything in the end. She's a copywriter and a social climber; she’s also a dead body and a murder case to be solved; the lover to one and the rival to another; she's a young and beautiful socialite, and also a vain intellectual's pet project for the perfect lady; she's a dream-girl for the detective, and a portrait on the wall; she is, finally, the astonishing twenty-four year old Gene Tierney— an assortment of ideals in search of a fixed reference. Laura is film noir getting ahead of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Everything which is told and shown of Laura must be taken with a grain of salt: all is relative to who is telling, who is listening and, most importantly, who is dreaming.
From what is dreamed, wished, fantasied ensues a competition of representations struggling to capture, or create, the essence of Laura. The prime teller, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a famous columnist and media figure, used that he is in concocting tales and enveloping the world in words, has his own Laura–– the perfect lady which he carefully tailored from copywriter to a standard of class and taste in high society. In a way, the film tells the story of how Lydecker loses his fantasy not to reality, but to another fantasy, namely, that of the prime listener and dreamer, detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), who ends up with his own version of Laura. As he finds himself increasingly caught up in his own fantasy, grown out of Lydecker's, he haunts her empty apartment at night, inspecting her things, reading her letters, drunk in obsession, thinking of “Laura”. Eventually he dozes off into a too-good-to-be-true reality, slumbering under the influence of Laura’s ever-gazing portrait.
Is half the movie, then, a dream? The other possibility is even less likely: Laura is back, alive and well, and some other girl named Diane, who looks just like her, is the actual victim. And nobody seemed able to recognize this, let alone do they care about Diane’s sudden disappearance. Back to life, now, Laura does exactly what our dreamer detective McPherson wants her to do. Then they fall in love, and he not only performs his job with excellence, but also gets to frequent that very world which before he had merely heard of and fantasied about. Too far-fetched. Waldo Lydecker says near the end, "Laura, you're not yourself". Indeed, this is no longer his Laura, but McPherson's. In the competing representations of Laura, the detective has won, for he gave up on truth and opted for the dream.
And that was Laura for “she was only a dream”, as the lyrics by Johnny Mercer testify: he wrote them after the film was released, without even having seen it, and yet apprehended with great precision the very same metaphor which moves Otto Preminger’s masterpiece.
“Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall
The laugh that floats on the summer night that you can never quite recall”
“You can never quite recall”–– mere instances which pass by and haunt ever after, constantly menacing to actualize themselves entirely.
Visually, there's not much to Laura, just as, beyond the ideals, there’s not much to the title-character. The film comes out rather flat and Preminger seems aware of this – of how it can never live up to the ideal of Laura – and so he refrains from even trying. The style is indeed elegant, but, with some exceptions, conservative to a point of visual apathy. Almost like theatre on the screen, in Laura we see things from a far, mostly American-planned shots with three or four people on screen, few reaction or point of view shots, fewer zooms and close-ups, and almost no movement. The camera merely gazes on the characters from nowhere, without assuming a perspective: and yet this does not mean that there is an objective story being told. On the contrary, it means that what is implied, elicited, aroused without fulfillment, in a word, the invisible–– that’s where it’s at, precisely in what’s not there, like Laura. Laura works in intentional flatness, what gives it depth is what it lacks, namely, the true Laura.
Showing too much would work against the film’s raison d’être. We must always feel that there’s something missing: that the idea of Laura, evoked by the title song, the portrait, and Gene Tierney's face, is never present; and that only in this absence it becomes real and necessary, although never quite there, but simply hinted at, indicated, much like a platonic Idea.
Never does Laura attempt to cinematically realize its idea, make it concrete in camera, sound and action, like Hitchcock does in Vertigo. When Kim Novak walks out the bathroom enraptured in misty green light, entirely reconstructed as Madeleine: then James Stewart's character gets to realize his fantasy— which of course can only lead to disaster, for realizing a fantasy, revealing its essence, can only mean: revealing it is an illusion, for that’s what a fantasy is, something not real. Laura never goes there. It forgoes from realizing the real Laura: even if the second half of the picture is not a dream, that Laura is merely a comely girl, with her caprices and doubts, far from arousing such a varied sort of fantasies and ideals. To realize the idea of Laura would mean, like in Vertigo, to kill it. If Laura were realized, made flesh and blood on the screen, she wouldn't be Laura anymore, since Laura’s Laura is an idea: try to make it present and you kill it.
A particular scene shows exactly this. McPherson takes Laura to be interrogated at the police station. Interrogations aim to reveal the truth, get to the bottom of things, unveil what's hidden. The lights on the suspect's face carry that symbolism— reveal yourself as you truly are. When McPherson attempts to do this with Laura, after warily staring at him she suddenly looks down, deeply troubled, covering her eyes with her hands. She can’t take it. The light is too bright, it’s too much. It is as if she might be exposed in her transparency, her emptiness, for an idea has significance, that is, we’re only in awe of it, when it is not made present, when it is not actualized. In herself, without what is made of her, Laura has no substance, and with too much light she could be seen through.
Detective McPherson tries to confront the ideal.
Laura is too fragile to face the light.
She succumbs to exposure.
Detectives in film noir want the truth: they trail like hound dogs the many stories and facts and evidences, seeking the real thing— and then they discover there is no such thing as the real thing, but only versions on top of versions referring ultimately to nothing but a name wrapped in most beautiful attire: and that was Laura.
