Fleapit revisited:Laura.

"Love is eternal. It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout history. Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death" - Vera Caspary.

We hear these words coming from a radio towards the end of the 1944 film Laura (directed by Otto Preminger who was also responsible for The Man With The Golden Arm and whose career had a bizarre coda when he played Mr Freeze in the camp sixties TV version of Batman) and while they're undoubtedly both poetic and articulate, what we have witnessed leading up to them has us doubting their veracity.

Laura (Internet Archive) is the story, set in New York City and based on a contemporary novel by Caspary herself, of the aftermath of a murder. The murder of the beautiful, softly spoken, and polite yet quietly confident, generous, and extremely talented Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) in her apartment. It is also the story of the various men in her life, their motivations, and their character.

We're first introduced to her platonic friend Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) who, in mourning the loss of Laura, claims to be the only person who really knew her. Lydecker is a successful, intelligent, eccentric, and rich writer who has performed the role of confidante and mentor to Laura in her own rise. Though when the mood takes him, which it often does, he is not incapable of fiercely articulate verbal cruelty. He claims not to write with a pen but with a "goose quill dipped in venom".

Although when we first meet him he's using a typewriter. To write Laura's story. Or even her obituary. While sat in the bath. The bath of his own lavish apartment which is, of course, adorned with antiques. It is here Lydecker first meets with the detective assigned to the case, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). McPherson is smartly dressed, thorough, suspicious (as befits his calling), and just a touch cynical.

He doesn't seem to trust women (or 'dames' as he prefers to call them) but as he spends long hours drinking and pacing around Laura's apartment he seems to be making an exception for Laura. His interest in her becomes obsessive and soon he is blurring the line between the professional and the emotional. As Lydecker neatly puts it in a warning to McPherson, "you'll end up in a psychiatric ward. I don't think they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse".

While McPherson seems to be falling in love with an idea of a woman, the real Laura had been engaged to be married to Shelby Carpenter (played by a young, though still physically imposing, Vincent Price). Carpenter is a gentle giant who falls asleep at classical recitals, he's unfailingly polite if a little dim, and Lydecker holds him in low esteem ostensibly because of this and his Kentucky background but really, and very thinly disguised, because of his relationship with Laura.

Carpenter also has an unusually flirtatious relationship with Laura's aunt Ann (Judith Anderson) who had been tasked with identifying Laura's body. The finger of suspicion points everywhere and as the story both develops in the present and in flashback, we see these suspicions and rivalries played out using brilliant, witty, and incisive dialogue and a series of dramatic set pieces in which you're never totally certain what might happen next.

There is little action to speak of except in implication but there are some classic shots that would go on to become templates for the direction of film noir post-Laura. Silhouetted figures, in hats - of course, walk dark streets in the rain, pensive men with furrowed brows pace up and down smoking cigarettes, and hardly anyone appears in a corridor or on a staircase without a lengthy foreboding shadow looming up behind them.

About halfway through the film, the story turns, spectacularly, on its axis and not for the last time either. The eventual denouement is genuinely chilling and David Raskin's (The Big Combo, Two Weeks In Another Town) score is unobtrusive yet like the film itself gains our trust in the relatively uneventful opening half-hour so that it can be employed all the better to ratchet up the tension later on.  

Laura is a wonderful film from a golden age of mystery. If some of the acting seems a bit stilted to our modern sensibilities then it's worth remembering this film is nearly eighty years old. Method acting was in its infancy in the United States and, besides, it doesn't really matter. The story is gripping and though played out in more dramatic fashion than many of us will, hopefully, experience in our lives it explores the most eternal themes of all. 

Those of love and death. It reminded me of a response Nick Cave, not long after the tragic death of his son Arthur, gave, on his Red Hand Files website, to a woman in Vermont grieving the loss of her parents:- "If we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable".

Beautiful words as we have come to expect with Cave. But, in the film Laura, the purity of love is tainted by the suspicion that someone, somewhere in this story, is only pretending to grieve.