Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

A fairly obvious precursor to Twin Peaks in their explorations of sexual obsession and romanticism of dead women. The choice to move Twin Peaks to small-town Americana is an interesting one, as Laura largely concerns itself with the rich upper-class elite and its seedy underbelly. Dana Andrews plays a working-class detective who acts as a cipher for the audience into the opulent and extravagant lifestyle of the rich and famous. Laura, too, is depicted as having worked her way up into this world with perserverance and smarts, rather than sneaky and underhanded methods of the people who surround her. This us vs. them mentality with regard to class in America, began in cinema as a reaction to the Depression, is a fertile playground still being dallied in today. It is not, however, the film's strongest point. Tough-talking Andrews is only sympathetic as a protagonist in relative comparison to the rest of the film's characters as the film's narrative economy leaves very little chance for the character to breathe and take on lifelike qualities. His defining trait is mostly the fact that he falls in love with Laura while investigating her murder case. Other women he's dated come up, and he discusses them bitterly. So the film appears to be trying to deal with the fact that it is easier to love a fantasy, as he does through the romanticized painting hanging in her living room as well as the biased accounts given to him by the many people he interviews, than to love a real person, who may contain all these lovable qualities, but also has a lot of messy, less easy to love ones.

The second act twist is a pretty great one, at least from a narrative perspective.. Even having seen the movie before, I'd actually somehow managed to forget it. But, upon consideration, it mostly only serves to complicate the whodunit mystery of the film without enlivening or trying to deal with any of the film's previous themes. Laura the person turns out to be just as lovable and sweet and innocent as Laura the fantasy, having somehow managed to exist in a world of creeps and swindlers without noticing or being changed at all by them. This makes the eventual coupling with Andrews problematic and unconvincing. Supposedly we are supposed to buy that their shared backgrounds of hard work and ethical beliefs tie them together in a way that the rest of her company cannot, but it raises unanswered questions about what attracted her to this world to begin with.

Ignoring these problems, though, the film is indeed a breezy and entertaining bit of noir. It drops the ball trying to be something more than pretty good, but that doesn't change the fact that it actually IS pretty good. Laura's omnipresence in the first half is handled very nicely, especially with the cute framing of the painting in her apartment, and for a whodunit it does manage to be fairly unpredictable, especially considering how many years Hollywood has had to grind most of noir's tropes into cliches.