out of the past
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Jay
Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt (screenplay, based on the novel
by Vera Caspary), Otto Preminger (director) Laura / 1944
Despite
its near universal acclaim—the film has received almost a 100% rating on the
internet’s Rotten Tomatoes and was chosen for inclusion in The National Film
Registry—I’ve always felt that Otto Preminger’s 1944 movie Laura was a kind of creaky, if slick melodrama with an almost
sickly romantic theme song, repeated over and over again until any
discriminating audience member develops a headache. Each time I watch this
film, I am forced to hum its sweeping/weeping strains for days on end, and for
that very reason alone I have tried to steer my viewing habits away from it for
years, encountering it only by accident again the other day, after watching a
Turner Classics Movie repeat of Hitchcock’s
North by Northwest.
Speaking of Hitchcock, for a far better
version of Laura, its lead equally
mesmerized by a dead woman who after haunting him comes back to life, you might
watch Vertigo. Much like Laura, Judy
Barton/Madeline Elster is stunningly made over by the men in her life, which
ends in not only a loss of identity but in her death, both symbolically and
actual—the only major difference being that Laura survives her “death.” Or does
she?
The film certainly suggests that
possibility as, virtually camping out in Laura’s empty apartment and, after
having read her personal diaries and letters—let alone endured the ambient theme
music every time his eye (or the camera) catches a glimpse of the kitschy
painted-over photograph of the high-toned dame—he falls into a kind of cheap
scotch-induced sleep. At that very moment the door opens and a suddenly
resurrected Laura enters her apartment!
All
right, there is still great amount of action to be played out after that. And
Laura explains her absence: she has been at her country house, thinking things
out. The dead woman, the plot reveals, was not Laura, but a fellow employee,
Diane Redfern. Finally, McPherson hasn’t yet solved the murder!
But let us imagine that in his poor
confused mind, he solves the crime not in real time, but in dream time. That he
has called up a seemingly real-life dame in order to get to the bottom of things,
and that the rest of the film is simply a dreamscape which resolves what
logically—particularly given the dozens of abandoned clues and dead-ends that
are never resolved—cannot be sorted out. The film even clues us into that
possibility when, as Laura Hunt enters the door, suddenly back from the dead,
McPherson rises and rubs his eyes as if to reassure himself that he isn’t
dreaming. But, obviously, the visual clue reasserts that very possibility, as
does Lydecker’s own final radio broadcast, suggesting that love “reaches beyond
the dark shadow of death.”
Although Ann Treadwell has motive, she appears to be too wrapped up
in herself to have plotted out such a murder—although, as she herself admits,
she has certainly imagined it!
No, the man who most irritates McPherson
is the nasty, spiteful, effeminate, class-conscious snob, Waldo Lydecker, who
abuses the young policeman every chance he gets, even to the point of
diagnosing McPherson’s “disease,” suggesting that he should seek out a
psychiatrist’s help:
You'd better watch
out, McPherson, or you'll finish up in a psychiatric
ward.
I doubt they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.
Beginning with the insertion of his naked
body in the very scene (demeaning McPherson even more by demanding that the cop
hand him his towel and robe, as if he were a personal dresser), Lydecker has
pushed his way into the cop’s life as if he,
the journalist, were stalking the cop, rather than the other way around.
Given Lydecker’s recognition of McPherson’s slim, attractive body (qualities
for which he accuses Laura for having been smitten), it almost appears that
Lydecker, himself, rather than Laura, is on the “hunt,” that despite Lydecker’s
obsession with his Pygmalion-like creation Laura, it is McPherson who takes him
over the edge.
Since
the savior-policeman has defeated time, like Orpheus freeing his Eurydice from
death, it is utterly necessary for McPherson to destroy all remnants of present
time that remain, including Lydecker’s two beloved matching grandfather clocks.
He kicks in Lydecker’s home clock in search for the missing “weapon,” and,
discovering the hidden entry to the pendulum machine’s lower parts of the
second clock in Laura’s apartment, he ultimately uncovers the murder weapon,
oddly returning it its hiding place so that he might, inexplicably, pick it up
again in the morning. Like so many of his actions throughout the film, his
explanation further represents his illogical behavior—the behavior of dream-time
rather than sober daily police sleuthing. And in the final shootout with
Lydecker that clock to is revealed as having been destroyed.
Whether or not she truly exists, hardly
matters. Having fought for her, the “dumb” cop has won, and Laura is now his (for
eternity if the reality is one of his own imagination), she now able to
transform him—a change he seems utterly willing to embrace—into a more
civilized and sophisticated human being. Indeed, underlying the entire film and
the Vera Caspary novel upon which it was based, is a struggle for
self-improvement, class mobility, and social improvement.
If
my version of this otherwise unconvincing film seems too-far-fetched, it
certainly seems more plausible than studio head Darryl F. Zanack’s revision of
the film’s ending, in which the entire story was revealed to have been a
product of Lydecker’s imagination. Even the savvy columnist Walter Winchell admittedly
could not comprehend that scenario, insisting to Zanuck that he had to change
it.
For me, it’s just as difficult to believe that
Preminger’s ending represents a kind a realist playing out of events. At least,
if it’s McPherson’s imaginative recreation of reality, things work out better
for everyone, even if Laura simply represents the fantastical illusion of a cop
who’s gone over the edge—the same position, after all, in which Vertigo’s cop, Scottie discovers himself
in the later masterful Hitchcock masterwork.
Los Angeles,
September 29, 2014
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