Vera Caspary’s best-known story, Laura, is told from multiple viewpoints; character is mystery, and action becomes a question. Otto Preminger’s fluid, probing style replaces the “purp purp” of a cop’s pipe and privileges the audience by unearthing the corrosive layer beneath the sublime surface of Manhattan’s art world. Clifton Webb sets the tone of duplicity as the outwardly cynical, inwardly hysterical columnist Waldo Lydecker, while haunted cop Dana Andrews falls in love with a painted image. As Laura, Gene Tierney is at once ethereal and cunning, like cinema itself, a dream wanting a life of its own.