Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) has widely been acclaimed a great noir film and a mystery you can never tire of watching. The latter claim is less testable though this scribe would agree that it remains a memorable whodunit movie. The question of Laura being a great noir film is worth critical inquiry.
The movie’s opening with a voiceover in the character of Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) creates the inciting incident – the murder of Luara Hunt (Gene Tierney) – for which Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is visiting to question Lydecker. The VO is critical to the mystery in the plot since (big spoiler alert) it keeps the fact from the audience that Lydecker is dead by the end of the movie. That’s what mysteries do – hide some important detail to keep the viewers guessing. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) does about the same in the opening sequence with the VO of Joe Gillis (William Holden).
On IMDb and other movie database pages, Laura is categorized as film noir and several articles about the movie also remember it as a great work in the noir genre. So let’s address the question of Laura as film noir. In 2021, Yours Retro magazine published an article “Unlocking the mystery of a great film noir” in which Geoff Andrew attempted to show that the movie was a noir classic, but failed his purpose as his short article quickly went off tangents loosely connected to the article’s mission. The article does acknowledge that Laura breaks with “convention in various ways is what makes it so satisfying and so special.”
What Andrew didn’t touch was the detail of how much Laura breaks with noir convention. Is it too much to leave the noir lane altogether or enough to stay in it barely by inches? I argue the former to be the case. And here are my main reasons.
First, the protagonist in noir is a character with a shady past who is helplessly trapped in his/her circumstance and there’s no safe (good) way out of it. In Laura, McPherson has no such issues. His character is simply that of a clean, traditional police detective. It’s the antagonist (Lydecker) who is trapped in his bubble and qualifies as a regular villain of a traditional mystery who goes after his target upon failing to achieve his plans. It doesn’t make Lydecker Joe Gillis but denies the movie’s entry to the noir circle through the main entrance.
Secondly, the eponymous character Laura doesn’t fit the trademark femme fatale sketch while she does hover over it for some time. She doesn’t have any lies to sell to the protagonist that would make his course (more) dangerous. We don’t see Laura really entrapping any men and her character fits that of a mystery woman who is a suspect in the murder case. But she comes clean of it all – not a noir thing in the least.
Another point that critics like Andrew have cited in their assessments of Laura as a noir is the protagonist’s obsession with Laura – his love for her. You can see it in the movie; but it’s way more telling than seeing. McPherson’s purported obsession isn’t backed up by visual representation on the screen. We hardly see him expressing any intense emotions around or about Laura that would show his love/passion for her. What is visible is a detective interested in the woman but more in his work so that he never tries to cover up for her or fail to scrutinize her professionally. The chemistry of obsession is invisible.
Finally, noir doesn’t end with the good guy killing the bad guy to save the innocent woman who is a suspect – and the world returning to the better place that traditional murder mysteries subscribe to for their ending. Throughout the movie and at the end, noir has a dark tone and the fog doesn’t lift because the mystery is solved. If it does, you watched a mystery not noir.
Verdict: Laura is a classic mystery with some visual elements of noir but most of it doesn’t fit comfortably in the noir slot.
