Laura (1944)
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007In my case, self-absorption is completely justified.
As a teenager in the 1940s, my mother was a self-professed movie buff, spending a lot of her free time with her friends at the matinees and double features in Schenectady, New York, where she grew up. She probably lost count of the number of movies that she see saw back in the day, but one she remembered forty and fifty years later was Laura. When Fox finally came to their senses and released it on VHS some time ago, I was finally able to appreciate why. This atmospheric whodunit is probably one of the finer examples of film noir, even if its high-society setting probably places it slightly outside the canon of pure noir. Tough-talking detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) and morally flexible playboy Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) drag it back inside the boundaries.
