Authentic and Inauthentic Love in ‘Laura’
Otto Preminger’s masterpiece is an unusual but beautiful noir love story that examines the danger of inauthentic love.
Otto Preminger’s 1944 noir masterpiece, “Laura,” seems to begin out of nowhere. We are immediately thrust into a room with a large portrait of a beautiful woman, and the music arrives just as mysteriously as the portrait. “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,” we hear a voice intone, which turns out to belong to one Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a New York writer who has a flair for the dramatic.
His haughty narration is interrupted by the arrival of “another of those detectives,” who is hot on the case to find Laura’s murderer. That detective is Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) and he fits the part of the New York noir detective: intelligent, irreverent, though not really dark or in anguish (the usual antihero detective), and certainly not caring for the rules of pretentious wealthy people.
McPherson paces around Lydecker’s apartment. He’s curious, carefully evaluating Lydecker’s aesthetic choices: various Greek and Asian masks adorn the walls, paintings, books, clocks, and other seemingly valuable objects people like McPherson would not understand. At least, that is what Lydecker thinks, but McPherson’s gift lies precisely in his unsuspecting appearance. He may wear his fedora crookedly but the only thing that actually reveals his distaste for irrelevant social hierarchy and authority.
Laura is the mystery, and at this point, we only “know” her from the opening scene and the portrait. Lydecker thinks that he is the only one who truly knew her, and it is clear in some way that he wants to keep it that way. Even in death, he wants to possess her. He’s sleazy in his own upper crust way. Priding himself on being part of New York’s intelligentsia, Lydecker looks down on people like McPherson.