Last weekend was not a good weekend for new releases. I would have maybe gone to see the new Exorcist movie, but the reviews were coming back horrible, and horror movies are one of the few genres where I won’t go out of my way to see something on opening weekend, especially if the reviews are bad. And next weekend isn’t looking much better unless I suddenly have an interest in a Taylor Swift concert film. I have nothing against Swift or her legions of fans, but I don’t think I could name one of her songs if I tried. So, why not find something that I have long been interested in? My mom is a big fan of murder mysteries, and one of her favorites is 1944’s Laura. That recently popped up on The Criterion Channel.
And if I knew Vincent Price had a supporting role in it, I might have gone looking for it sooner.
Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is investigating the murder of advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). She was killed by a shotgun blast in her own home, and there aren’t exactly a lot of clues. If anything, the problem is all the viable suspects all seem to have loved Laura. There’s her platonic, older friend, newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), her parasitic fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), Carpenter’s socialite aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), and even Laura’s maid Bessie (Dorothy Adams). All had the means to kill Laura, particularly Carpenter. The thing is, none of them have the desire from the looks of things. There’s no motive. Laura was a universally beloved figure. Why would anyone want her dead?
That’s the mystery here as McPherson, the typical hard-nosed detective type of many a noir, looks into her death, starting with Lydecker, a snooty fellow who initially approves of McPherson’s taking the case but then starts to see him as some coarse interloper. Carpenter seems insincere whenever he opens his mouth and may have been cheating on Laura. Treadwell wants Carpenter to stay with her. But none of these people have any animosity towards Laura. It would take a hell of a motive to blow someone away with a shotgun, and the more McPherson hears about Laura, to say nothing of having her portrait hanging where he can see it everyday, he may find himself falling for her himself.
Alright, bottom line: this is a classic sort of noir where everything is done just about right. My only real complaint is Andrews seems a bit wooden compared to everyone else in the movie. Everyone else is spot-on. I’ve never seen Tierney in anything before to the best of my knowledge, but it’s easy to see why everyone seems to fall for Laura. The actress and the character both come across as almost unfailingly sweet, the sort of woman who will make excuses for others when they do her wrong and whose personal pluck can thaw the heart of even an indominable snob like Lydecker. Webb also excels as the society columnist who thinks he’s just better than everybody and doesn’t mind letting everyone know it. I especially liked Price’s turn as Carpenter, mostly because I’m more used to some of Price’s more flamboyant or horror movie character roles, and he just seems to downright oily in this one.
But good characters aside, it doesn’t matter much without a good mystery, and this one is a damn good mystery. As a movie, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, parcels out the clues at the right pace, and in the end, has a murderer revealed when the suspects list does not contain an obvious killer. If anything, the most obvious suspect is perhaps innocent. I know from the Stacker Challenge that Otto Preminger ran a tight ship and produced some great work, often with mature elements that he managed to get past the censor boards at the time. Laura was very much worth the wait for me to see, and it’s just another great example of how, even though murder mysteries are still a thing and good to great ones still exist, they just don’t make ’em like they used to, and they used to make ’em really good.
Grade: A-
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