Laura

Based on the novel by Vera Caspary

featuring

Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price,

Caspary’s best-known story, Laura (1943), is told from multiple viewpoints; character is mystery, and action becomes a question. Preminger’s fluid, probing style replaces the “purp purp” of a cop’s pipe and privileges the audience with 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.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jay Dratler
  • Samuel Hoffenstein
  • Betty Reinhardt
Based On
  • the novel by Vera Caspary

Cinematographer
  • Joseph La Shelle
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 88 mins
Source
  • Criterion Pictures