Her name may be the title of the film, yet Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) remains something of a mystery throughout Laura. That’s partly because, at the movie’s start, Laura is dead. Murdered, to be precise—shot in the face, to be more so, a detail that is both pertinent to the plot and also reflective of the lurid, graphic nature of this 1944 film noir. (Director Otto Preminger, who was partial to his sort of material, adapts a novel by Vera Caspary.)
As the movie begins, Det. Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is grilling a couple of suspects: Waldo (Clifton Webb), the older, urbane, high-society columnist whose mentoring relationship with Laura had become romantic; and Shelby (Vincent Price), a silky hanger-on taking money from Laura’s wealthy aunt (Judith Anderson) even as he and Laura had been moving toward marriage.
Indeed, we learn in flashbacks told by both Waldo and Shelby that almost everyone who encountered Laura became enamored with her. A moody portrait of her hangs over the mantle in her lavish apartment; Preminger frequently arranges the frame so that her image looms over the other characters. Even the thick-skinned detective—who mostly keeps his head down while gathering the facts, letting the class insults slide off him—begins to succumb to her mysterious charms late one night while looking for clues in Laura’s apartment. As the gaze of that portrait mixes with the perfume wafting from Laura’s nightstand, David Raksin’s score shifts from dramatic to romantic. McPherson’s professional defenses are broken down and he, too, falls under her spell.
For the first third of the movie, Laura has a ghostly presence—something like the never-seen title character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (a connection emphasized by the presence of Anderson, who played the iconic Mrs. Danvers in the 1940 thriller). All of which means this is a tough part for Tierney, especially when—spoiler alert—Laura shows up alive, having been hiding out in her country home to mull over her impending marriage to Shelby. (It turns out another woman had been invited by Shelby to Laura’s apartment, where she was murdered.) And so Tierney must bring the ghost to life and put flesh on that alluring portrait on the mantle. For the most part she manages the trick, while still remaining coy enough to become a third suspect.
Laura piles up the intrigue and obsession, leading to a violent climax in which Preminger dials up the filmmaking temperature too. The final shot is a swish pan from the murderer, having just been shot by police, to Laura and McPherson, followed by a camera push in to the grandfather clock behind them, damaged from taking a bullet in the gunfire exchange. The portrait, however, remains unscathed.
