Composer Leonard Bernstein writes: The single theme can identify a character, as in Raksin's eternal "Laura." The film portrayed a man falling in love with a ghost: The mystique was supplied by the insistence of the haunting melody. He could not escape it. It was everywhere. We may not remember what Laura was like, but we never forgot that she was the music. Otto Preminger's fluid, probing style privileges us with unearthing the corrosion beneath the sublime surface of New York's art world. In classic form, Laura is a whodunit in which any number of characters is capable of "doing it"-but just what has been done becomes the question here. Clifton Webb sets the tone of duplicity as the outwardly cynical, inwardly hysterical columnist Waldo Lydecker, whose protegé, Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) has apparently been murdered. Far more interesting than the petty rivalries of Lydecker and Laura's lover (Vincent Price) who moonlights as a gigolo, is the case of the "normal" cop (Dana Andrews) who can boast of the only consistent nature in the film: consistently bitter, consistently noir. An empty vessel, he becomes filled with the haunting image of Laura's portrait and falls in love for the first time-with a dead woman. As Laura, the thing in itself, Gene Tierney is at once ethereal and cunning; a dream, in any case, not to be believed.