Is it Laura herself, or one of the two main Male leads?
David Main, December 2018
Laura (1944) is a film that was based on a book written by Vera Caspary (1943) which first appeared as a serialised story (Ring Twice for Laura) in Collier’s Magazine in 1942. The film version followed in 1944.
Within the ranking of FN critics of films made in the “classic” period of Film Noir (1941 – 1958) as classified by Cornwell and Hobbs in their paper Defining Film Noir, Laura was cited by 11 of the 12 FN critics as being an example of Film Noir (FN).
Identifying the PP in most FN is reasonably straightforward, there are certain aspects to a PP character that are indicative of that character being the main character in the film, these include, but are not limited to the following aspects of a film; the order in which characters are given billing on the advertising posters for the film and in the opening credits at the start of the film itself. Where we encounter and leave the character in the film is also a good indicator as PP characters tend to be the focus of the story being told and as such they tend to be seen in the first scenes and last scenes of the film (it is their story and has a beginning and an end). A FN typically tries to see the events of the film through the eyes of its protagonist by a character’s first person narrative the most obvious example of this is in Lady in the Lake (1946) which uses a first person camera viewpoint, this was experimental film making at the time and remains a bit of an oddity for mainstream films, but interestingly first person viewpoints are now used a lot in interactive storytelling within the computer games industry.
Other on screen indicators that are suggestive of the personal subjective viewpoint of a character can also be indicative that that character is the PP. Such personal viewpoints might be shown as representation of their dreams, illusions, or subjective perception shots e.g. looking in a mirror. However, these personal subjective representations are not entirely limited to the PP of a film, for instance The Blue Dahlia (1946), contains several “subjective” presentations of William Bendix’s point of view and therefore personal subjective viewpoints need to be treated with a bit of caution in making a decision on the PP of a film.
More typically the usage of the perspective of the PP in FN is illustrated in films such as The Big Clock (1948) or Double Indemnity (1944) which both have a very obvious main character that we follow through their story arc, from a start point to a happy or fatal ending. However, in some FN there is less usage of the direct viewpoints of the PP used and instead, the PPs story is told mostly if the flashback memories of other minor characters, such as Burt Lancaster’s PP character, Swede, in The Killers (1946). Another typical device used in films to convey the inner thoughts of a PP that goes beyond their behaviours and conversations on screen is to let the PP speak directly to the film audience by providing a narration or a voiceover, which is used to explain some background or the internal motivations of the PP to the audience. The voiceover, is usually a very good indicator that the PP is the character who conducts the first person narration (NB in some FN that have a more “documentary” style such as The Naked City (1948) the narrator is not the PP and the voiceover is of an unseen third person with a “neutral” perspective whose job is to do scene setting and summarising of events).
Further indicators to ascribing the PP role to a character can be partially derived by examining the amount of screen time they are given within the film. A PP should be the most important character in the film and as such they will typically get more of the time on camera than other characters in the film. Of course in many films there may be high screen time for more than one character, for instance a strong romantic lead for the PP or an important villain may also be given screen time in scenes with the PP as well as time in their own scenes, and screen time therefore becomes a less effective way to examine the PP depending on how much time is given to other members of the cast. Given that many FN were shot at a time when the film studios had many “stars” under contract, there would have been pressure to give as many of them as much screen time as they could within a film to help promote the actors and to an extent to keep them sweet.
Laura, a film with multiple potential candidates for the PP
In Laura, There are three main characters in the film, each of which has a good claim to be the PP of the film. The following text is an examination of these three characters and how well they might fit the profile of the PP in Laura.
Gene Tierney plays the titular character in the film, Laura Hunt. Gene Tierney’s name is listed first on the top of the movie poster for the film followed by Dana Andrews. Images of these two characters are the only graphics on the poster and as with the names; Gene Tierney’s character’s image is placed higher than the image of Andrews’s character. No other character in the film is given a graphical representation on the poster.
Clifton Webb is the next actor named on the poster, but his name is given in a smaller sized font, and placed on a banner which is below the art work on the film poster (the images of Tierney and Andrews). Vincent Price and Judith Anderson are also named here, on the lower banner which suggests that all three are actors in supporting roles, rather than the stars of the film. So the poster for the film, which is selling it to the cinema going public of the time, puts Tierney’s character Laura in the pole position as the contender for the PP
However, despite the top billing she gets as an actress on the film poster and the character she plays is the titular character in the film, can we actually say that Laura is the PP of the film?
Laura does get quite a lot of screen time within the film, although her presence in the first half of the film is actually only through the flashbacks of other characters who had known Laura, so the flashbacks represent the recalled memories of Laura (who is presumed to be dead when they are recalling this information). The important part of these recalls is that they are seen through the eyes of other characters rather than Laura’s own memories being recalled. It is only in the second half of the film that Laura is seen on screen as a person in the present tense. The film audience can see Laura as a highly capable, creative and successful woman who has risen in both professional and social circles. Combined with her physical beauty, Laura is also portrayed as have many male admirers and suitors. Yet once we meet the real “live” Laura, her role in the film seems very rooted in a rather stereotypical Hollywood romantic lead role where she is attached to the lead male character (Dana Andrews), who plays the homicide detective who is investigating her “murder”. Her business acumen and her acceptance in high society seem in stark contrast to her ability to choose the men in her life. Waldo seems to want to control her and is jealous of any other man who comes near her. She has got engaged to Shelby who is portrayed as a glib glaringly dishonest man who is only after her for her money, while the male hero who would appear to be the man who will save her from all this, has actually fallen in love with her portrait when he thought she was a corpse whose murder he was investigating. Laura, it would appear has a massive blindspot when considering her male companions and suitors.
An interesting viewpoint and some revealing quotes about the role of Laura can be found in the following Library of America website from 2016:
” ‘Who wants to play a painting?’ These were reportedly Gene Tierney’s words when offered the title role in Laura, based on Vera Caspary’s razor-sharp and silken-smooth 1943 novel. One can hardly blame her. Caspary herself hated the draft of the script she was given and, in her memoir, recounts director Otto Preminger referring to her complicated and ambitious heroine as ‘a nothing, a non-entity.’ (Caspary came to believe her battles with Preminger paid off and that the finished film, which she praised, reflected her input—in particular, a strengthening of Laura and greater emphasis on both her ‘generosity and romantic shortsightedness.’)”
These quotes and observations appear to show that the director had no intention of making the character of Laura anything other than a love/obsession interest for the make characters in the film.
Laura as a Femme Fatale (FF)
although Tierney’s Laura character is central to the story being told, she is not I believe a fully credible contender for being a Female PP. Within the film it seems that other characters who meet Laura change or act differently simply due to having met her (or just seen her portrait). Her role in the film appears to be to act as sort of living catalyst who causes those close to her to change. Most notably it is the male characters she encounters who seem to become strongly attracted to her for a number of different reasons. Consequently their actions and behaviours become focused on their relationship and future with Laura. Laura herself does not appear to be particularly active in making those around her act differently, her mere presence is enough to do that and her mostly passive interactions with multiple male characters would seem to indicate that she could be considered as a FF within the film. Although the term FF is often associated with Film Noir, FF characters can be found in many different film genres and more problematically the term is really too broad to be useful for understanding the role of such characters in films. I believe we can subdivide FF characters into three subgroups, a) are female characters such as Rita Hayworth’s Gilda. These FF are woman who have the ability to attract and enrapture more than one of the key male characters in the film without really having to try, although flirtation (within the societal norms of the time the film was made) would be acceptable within this lowest category of FF, these woman act as “Man-magnets” as they exert a mostly passive but powerful force on the man around them. A second level FF b) has the same power over men as the previous category, but these women are also willing to use a more direct active manipulation to the men who fall under their spell and once they have enough influence over their victim they use their power to get these male characters to do things (typically illegal) to gain them monitory or other benefits that they would not have likely to have attained without their eager to please male victims, see Joan Bennett’s character Kitty, in Scarlett Street (1945) as an example. The crimes the men commit can vary in seriousness but fall below the act of, or assistance in, carrying out a murder. This category of FF is Machiavellian in style as they plan to gain e.g. wealth or power and they know how to manipulate the men around them to achieve their goal. A third and more deadly form of the FF c) is capable of doing anything the lower levels of FF are willing to do, but they also willing to kill or get others to murder for them in order to achieve their goals. See for instance Jane Greer’s character, Kathie in “Out of the Past” (1947) or Barbara Stanwyck’s character Phyllis in “Double Indemnity” (1944).
Using these guidelines for sub classification of FFs I would consider that the character of Laura functions as a “Man Magnet” type of FF. She just has to exist for men to fall at her feet and become devoted to her.
So although Gene Tierney’s character is definitely the lead Female Protagonist (FP) in the film and she is a powerful but low level FF, she is not nearly active enough to be made the film’s PP. Indeed, the film plot focuses on the supposed murder of Laura, and as such it follows the detective (Mike) who is trying to solve the murder case while much of the rest of the film also tracks the thoughts and actions of the other main male character and the voiceover narrator (Waldo). In these two characters the film offers two much stronger contenders for the PP role in the film.
The case for a Male PP in the film
In the following sections we will explore the potential for the other two contenders to be the PP in the film as both appear to have the potential to be the PP rather than the character of Laura herself.
The three key male characters in the film are played by Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker), Dana Andrews (Detective Mike McPherson) and in a more minor role, Vincent Price (Shelby Carpenter, who is Laura’s fiancé). All three of these men are fascinated by and attracted towards Laura. However, all of them have very different reasons for their attraction. We might assume that all are romantically attracted towards her, given that we learn that Waldo uses his newspaper column to savage and rebuff the many male suitors who have attempted to court Laura, but of the three main Male characters, only Mike McPherson is truly romantically attracted towards Laura. We might have expected Shelby who is engaged to Laura, to be included in a group of men who are romantically obsessed with Laura, but the film makes it quite obvious that Shelby is a weak willed mercenary playboy who is more interested in getting hold of Laura’s money than being in love with her. Indeed Shelby appears to be more romantically involved with Laura’s aunt, Anne than with Laura herself. Anne is also revealed as regularly giving Shelby money as he seems permanently broke. Despite his engagement to Laura and the barely concealed affair he is having with her aunt, the film also reveals Shelby is having an affair with Diana, one of Laura’s employee’s. Later in the film, we find out that Diana is actually the woman who was murdered in Laura’ apartment, as Shelby had taken her there when Laura was out of town.
Shelby as a character is shown to have an easy but superficial charm, a man who mingles with the rich set and is, at some level, honest enough to admit he is penniless and needs a job (which Laura gives him). He even appears to be reasonably good at doing his job, but he is also shown as a blatant philanderer who despite being engaged to the rich and beautiful Laura, is also having affairs with her aunt Anne and Diana, one of her clothes models. Judith Anderson who plays Laura’s aunt Anne, is also quite open with Laura about wanting to marry Shelby despite his obvious weaknesses and his existing engagement to Laura. Shelby’s base dishonesty is also revealed by Waldo who had traced a valuable gift that Laura had given to Shelby, which he had later given as a gift to Diana who had then pawned it for cash. Waldo uses this information to confront Laura with this evidence of Shelby’s affair and his giving away of her gift to another woman. Waldo uses the information in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Laura to break off her engagement with Shelby. The more we see of Shelby, the less the film audience are given to have much sympathy with Shelby. He could be certainly be viewed as the murder suspect and his actions and lies when being questioned by Detective McPherson certainly cast a strong shadow of suspicion on him, yet he is almost too obvious to be a real suspect for the murder, while not having enough screen time or in depth examination of his story to be considered as the PP of the film. We can therefore dismiss Shelby as the PP and proceed to work out whether Waldo or Mike is the PP in the film. Both characters have a lot of screen time throughout the film and this measure therefore cannot be used to gauge which of them is the PP.
The case for Waldo Lydecker as the PP appears to rest on two important markers that often are indicators of a PP; a) It is Waldo’s voice that provides the voiceover narrator role, informing the audience of what is happening from his perspective although, by the end of the film we recognise he is actually an unreliable narrator. B) Many PP tend to “Top and Tail” a film by appearing in the opening or a very early scene and also appearing in the closing scene of the film. Waldo conforms to this rule of thumb and his voiceover supplies the first and last words spoken in the film.
These two aspects along with the high amount of screen time would certainly favour a PP role for Waldo. I would also concede that that Laura, as a film, with Waldo as the PP makes a lot of sense as an example of a FN, as Waldo’s “story” has the main character become obsessed with a woman and in order to maintain his hold over Laura he descends into a set of behaviours including murder which leads him to an inevitable doom. His character arc is recognisably noirish.
Waldo Lydecker is a complex character; he is an influential newspaper columnist and a wealthy socialite who enjoys having all the best things in life, including a collection of highly valuable museum quality furniture and other rare items. Waldo is a narcissist who admits to “total self-absorption” and does not suffer fools gladly. His superior attitude to others is noticeably patronising and snobbish both in personal encounters with other characters in the film and through his use of his newspaper columns and radio broadcasts to attack and demean individuals whose reputations he wants to destroy.
Waldo’s relationship with Laura
After an initial dismissing of the ambitious Laura who “doorsteps” him for a product endorsement while he is eating in a restaurant, Waldo later apologises to her and starts to cultivate her friendship. Waldo is shown in the flashback sequences early in the film to have had a significant role in Laura’s rise to fame and fortune, as Waldo has used his power and influence to help her move up the professional and social ladders and as such he has acted as Laura’s mentor, teacher, friend and moral guardian. His relationship to Laura is never fully explained in the film, he seems to have been until relatively recently a friend who spent at least a couple of evenings a week in Laura’s company.These evenings (In Waldo’s recall of them) appeared to consist of Laura being “treated” to Waldo’s taste in food, music, art and listening to Waldo reading his own newspaper columns to her. Waldo can be seen as a control freak and his need to have Laura entirely to himself is enforced by his aggressive usage of his newspaper articles to discourage any possible suitors for Laura. Waldo, aside from the obvious age difference does not appear to be sexually interested in Laura, indeed there is some evidence that Waldo is supposed to be a homosexual character in the film, although this sexuality was not easily portrayed in Hollywood films of this era. The fact that Clifton Webb was cast as Waldo may in part of been because Webb was evidently well known in Hollywood circles for being homosexual.
In the film itself the opening scene set in Waldo’s home where Waldo sits in his bath whilst being interviewed by Mike after which Waldo gets out of his bath (of screen) asking Mike to hand him his robe is a hint at the sexuality of Waldo’s character. So Waldo’s interest and indeed obsession with Laura appears to be rooted in something other than ‘standard’ sexuality, elements of a less direct and more voyeuristic fixation on Laura might also be discerned in some of Waldo’s behaviour. Exactly what the director and script writers wished to express as Waldo’s (sexual) relationship with Laura may be an amalgam of a number of what at the time would have simply been classified as “deviant” behaviours. However, we view the overt sexual aspect of Waldo’s motivations, it seems likely that we could ascribe a lot of Waldo’s fixation with Laura as being part of Waldo’s desire to collect and surround himself with beautiful things.
In this interpretation, Laura is objectified into an item that belongs in Waldo’s private collection of fine arts, she becomes his “possession”, where he can lavish attention on her and further advise and educate her to attain even greater professional and social heights. He is jealous of anyone else who might potentially take Laura away from him as within his own mind, he has made her who she is and therefore she “belongs” solely to him. This narcissistic and controlling need for Laura to remain under his sole influence becomes severely challenged with her engagement to Shelby. This shifting of Laura’s affections into a permanent state of marriage to another man would be extremely threatening for Waldo and he becomes focused and highly motivated to try to make Laura see that Shelby is already cheating on her. By confronting her with his evidence, Waldo believes Laura will have no option but to reject Shelby and consequently return to the role of Waldo’s personal object d’art. Waldo’s (apparent) failure to have removed Shelby from Laura’s life eventually prompted the ultimate narcissistic response from Waldo – If he couldn’t have her, then no one else could have her. A belief that killing her would stop anyone else from having her, while also allowing Waldo to retain intact his “memory of Laura” as being perfect and forever linked to him alone. (Such narcissistic motivations for murder do actually occur in the real world).
The character of Waldo is present throughout the film and indeed he provides a voiceover giving his point of view at the very start of the film, so that the film story appears to be taken from his perspective. Despite this, I am not convinced that Waldo is the film’s PP. According to the “Laura” film page on Wikipedia the film’s producer and eventual director Otto Preminger, did not want the original directors choice to cast the established actor, Laird Cregar, to play Waldo:
…to Preminger’s dismay, he cast Laird Cregar, known for his portrayal of Jack the Ripper in The Lodger, in the key role of Lydecker. The producer felt casting an actor with a reputation for playing sinister roles would lead the audience to become suspicious of Lydecker earlier than necessary. He favoured Clifton Webb, a noted Broadway actor who hadn’t appeared before the cameras since 1930, and who at that time was performing in the Noël Coward play Blithe Spirit in Los Angeles.
Although we can understand that the film might be more likely to successfully hide who the murderer is by not using a big named star who had made his name playing characters such as Jack the Ripper in the role, by instead casting a relatively unknown and forgotten film actor to play Waldo does seem to make the prospect of Waldo being the PP of the film much less likely. Waldo considered in this context is a key character in the film who might gain the trust of the audience through his narrator role as the film begins but he would not be the PP as this would be a role for one of the “stars” signed up for the film. However, Waldo as a character and they way he is played by Clifton Webb does make Waldo the only really fully developed character in the film. Laura is an attractive woman who is pleasant to everyone and seems if anything a bit too nice and a bit too perfect. Shelby is a charming but very obvious feckless money grabber, while Aunt Anne is blatantly trying to get Shelby to marry her rather than his fiancé and her niece Laura. As we will see below the only other main character in the film, Mike McPherson, is a bit lacking in the personality department as well. It is therefore not hard to see why Waldo might be seen as the PP, as his effete and waspish persona rather “steals” the show in terms of dialogue and acting.
The other main contender for the PP is Detective Mike McPherson as it is his investigation of the murder of “Laura” that propels the plot, he interviews all the other characters in the film about Laura and learns about who she is, then in the surprise reveal half way through the film we find Laura is still alive and she and Mike seem to fall in love at first sight (NB Mike seems to have fallen in love with Laura by just looking at her portrait hung on the wall of her apartment. An act which is even odder considering that at that point in time, he believed she was the mutilated corpse whose murder he was investigating.
The case for Mike McPherson as the PP is reasonably compelling. It is his name that is paired with Gene Tierney at the top billing of the Film poster and for good reason; it is the romance between Laura and Mike that provides the film with an unusual but romantic centre. He is given a lot of screen time and is the first character seen in the film (although Waldo’s voiceover actually opens the film). Mike is also in the closing scene of the film when Waldo dies.
Mike is a detective and the plot of the film is centred around his investigation of a murder, so although we hear Waldo’s voiceover of events and see how his influence in the past helped Laura rises up to become the successful woman of the film title, it is Mike’s present day questioning and dissection of the witnesses stories that are the driving force of the film.
What makes Laura a memorable film is probably in the oddity and the slightly macabre aspects of the romance between Mike and Laura which acts as the crucial hook for the film, because Mike is the detective who is sent to investigate Laura’s murder. The first time he sees “Laura” was in the crime scene photographs of the body of a murdered woman who had been hit in the face by both barrels of a shotgun at point blank range. Not exactly an image that would be considered to be the start point of a romance. Throughout the film we follow Mike as he begins to question those who knew Laura to try and find out why she was murdered and by who. The more Mike hears about Laura from the various characters who knew her (Waldo her “mentor” and protector, Shelby her fiancée, Ann her aunt {who also appears to be in relationship with Shelby}, and Bessie, her housekeeper.) Their answers to his questions and the narratives of important points from the past, which are shown in the film as flashbacks, provide Mike with a front row seat of how Laura managed to move up the professional and social ladders and become a successful high achiever.
Combined with her personality and her beauty she had no end of suitors (Waldo used his newspaper column to disparage most of them and drive them off, for instance, the artist who painted Laura’s portrait being one of those savaged by Waldo). Mike seems dazzled by this woman he has never met and is unimpressed by the money grabbing Shelby and ill at ease and suspicious with the effete and waspish Waldo who obviously likes to consider himself as a man of superior taste, power and intellect. Mike’s fascination with his murder victim borders onto an obsessive state where Mike appears to have fallen in love with a woman he has only seen as a mutilated corpse. Waldo actually comments on this in the film when he predicts that Mike is already at the stage he was dreaming of a life in which he was married to Laura. Waldo then warns Mike that if he continued with this obsession he might end up having to enter a sanatorium and Waldo then comments “I doubt they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse”. This cutting comment by Waldo does emphasise to the audience the strangeness of Mike’s growing obsession with Laura and Mike’s lack of denial of Waldo’s perceptive analysis of Mike’s inner desires, seems to indicate the depth of Mike’s obsessions – it also may casts some light on Waldo’s own obsessive thoughts about Laura, as both men seem to share at least partially, the same obsession.
We can also see the Mike’s growing obsession with Laura in a crucial scene in the film which is set in Laura’s apartment where Mike has decided to revisit by alone late in the evening. His behaviour in the apartment shows how deeply he has become obsessed with Laura, as he looks at her belongings and helps himself to a the drink out of her mini-bar while staring longingly at the large painted portrait of Laura that hangs on the wall, his obsession with the dead woman is unnerving and quite disturbing. It is this macabre and rather gothic aspect to the story of Laura that gives it an edge. Towards the end of the scene Mike falls asleep in one of Laura’s chairs only to be awoken when Laura returns to her flat alive and well. When she wakes Mike up and asks why he is in her apartment, Mike literally rubs his eyes in disbelief at seeing Laura in the flesh before him, as if he could not work out if he was still dreaming or not. Perhaps the film director is adding a subtle and interesting little reference to the concept of Freudian wish fulfilment aspects within dreams.
The centrality of Mike’s obsession with the supposedly dead Laura means that the film plot could be summarised as “The story of a detective who falls in love with a dead woman who is the victim of a murder he is investigating”. It is this central story of a strange and obsessive love for a dead woman that promotes Mike McPherson to the likely PP for the story, as the audience will for the first half of the film be bemused as to how such a love could be reconciled with reality. Of course the arrival of the unhurt Laura back at her flat is the game changing moment in the film. After this reveal that Laura is still alive, the whodunit aspect of the story requires a major reassessment as we now don’t even know who the victim is. Laura’s return also vindicates the weird or deviant love obsession of Mike with Laura as they now slip quickly into an actual real world romantic entanglement (She conveniently, and rather bizarrely falls in love with Mike pretty much as soon as she meets him, as he is lounging about in her flat, supposedly investigating her murder.)
Other aspects, aside from the strange love story with the titular character, also make Mike a good choice as the PP is his presence at the start and end of the film. As noted earlier Mike is the first person seen in the film despite the first voice being Waldo’s and the scene being set in Waldo bathroom in his mansion. The book from which the film is adapted is also a good source of information. The opening of the book is like the film, set in Waldo’s home and is seen through Waldo’s eyes, but Mike McPherson is brought into the room to meet Waldo at the start of the second paragraph on the first page of the book, which seems as good an indicator that he could be seen as a prospective PP. The book is also informative in that in written form, the story is told through chapters seen through the eyes of multiple different and alternating narrators (including Mike McPherson) and not just by Waldo Lydecker. In the film we certainly see and hear the story from Waldo’s perspective in both his verbal conversations with Mike and in visual flashbacks. Shelby is also allowed a flashback of his early meetings with Laura, but the other characters (Anne and Bessie) are limited to their verbal recall of who Laura was. Mike McPherson who never met Laura is by comparison limited to present day events.
There are examples of films from many genres that do show an event or events as seen through different characters eyes but the film version of Laura adopts a limited narrative style compared to its source material in only giving Waldo the opportunity for a voiceover of what has occurred. (Only by the end of the film do the audience find out that Waldo has been an unreliable narrator throughout the film. Normally if there is a narrator in a film, they would be assumed to be reliable source of information). The reason for making Waldo an unreliable narrator in the film is that Waldo is actually the murderer and up until he is revealed as the killer in the final scenes of the film, the audience is likely to have considered his voiceover as a sign of his testimony being reliable and truthful, therefore lulling them into a false belief in Waldo not being a suspect in the murder.
Mike McPherson is the PP in my opinion. He is present at both the start and end of the film and he is the romantic interest for the FP. Despite the weird obsessive and dark aspect of his fascination with the presumably dead Laura, Mike and Laura appear to fall in love with each other immediately Laura “returns” from the dead. It is probably safe for the audience to assume that Mike will probably end up marrying Laura after the events portrayed in the film, although the film visually ends with a long lingering image of the broken antique clock where Waldo had hidden the murder weapon, rather than an image of the happy couple. Perhaps a message of something broken rather than something made?
Beyond the strange obsession with Laura, Mike’s character is not examined much in the film and all we really are given is a rather stereotypical straight but tough, even aggressive cop, with little of his personality revealed beyond what we might expect of a stereotypical American homicide detective of the era in which the film was made. However, his need to play with a small pocket game that requires concentration and fine motor skills at points in the film an act he explains he does in order to keep himself calm is the one hint that there are aspects to Mike’s past, and to his present mental health that we are not fully aware off. This lack of character development of Mike leaves us with a rather flat taciturn detective character which rather jars and is at odds with the man who has an obsessive love for the supposedly dead Laura. The two sides of Mike do not quite fit together and therefore Mike McPherson (as a whole character) does not make a great FN lead in this role. I would suggest that actually Webb’s interpretation of Waldo is actually a far better fleshed out FN character. It is why I cannot shake the feeling that Laura, is a memorable film, which is an above average whodunit with a good plot twist (the murder victim is alive) but for all its clever trickery and subversion of the reliable narrator role, the film contains only some Noir aspects but is to my mind not a particularly good example of a FN.
I do concede that a case can be made for Laura being classified as a FN particularly if you take Waldo as the PP. While both he and Mike are shown to be obsessive about Laura, Waldo, sees Laura as his personal creation and an object he believes he has a right to possess, which creates a dysfunctional and dangerous character, while Mike seems to have found in Laura a fantasy based “dream woman” who he has fallen in love with even though he thinks she is dead. These male characters obsessions are rather gothic or melodramatic in style but they are the only real “noir” aspects within the film. I would suggest that a better example of using a Male PP’s obsession with a female protagonist as the source of a noir story can be seen in James Stewart’s, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson character in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). How much Hitchcock drew from the book and film of Laura when making Vertigo is not known, but parallels between the character of Mike McPherson in Laura, and John Ferguson in Vertigo are interesting, as both are, or were police detectives both of whom have had a traumatic incident in their earlier police career; Mike needed major surgery on his leg after a shootout with a gangster and Ferguson had suffered severe vertigo during a rooftop chase after a criminal. and both films show these Male PP characters are intensely obsessive over a woman they believe to be dead. Indeed even the names of the two detectives seems to hint at Hitchcock’s source for his PP in Vertigo, as in the first chapter of the novel version of Laura, when Waldo first meets Detective Mike McPherson, he asks questions in which he tries to probe Mike’s personality to see if he had all the characteristics of his Scottish ancestors. Both McPherson and Ferguson are Scottish surnames and the obvious “Scottie” nickname Hitchcock gives John Ferguson does seem to be offering cinema goers of the time a clue to the type of obsessive male character that was previously shown in the story/film of Laura. A note on the thematic similarities of the films is noted in this review of Laura – http://emanuellevy.com/review/laura-1944/ Levy’s review also makes note of some of my own reservations on whether Laura really is a FN, as others have previously classified it as a romantic melodrama rather than a FN. Levy does try to answer such views by considering that the film is full of cynical characters who could have a motive for murdering Laura but having pondered this at some length, I still believe that the film plot and the PP, Mike McPherson (even with his gothic obsession with a corpse), is not really enough to classify Laura as a FN. For me, Laura fits a “whodunit” film tag or classification much more readily than a FN.
See also the following article which has some interesting observations on the film and its relation to Film Noir:
‘Barbed Wire and Forget-Me-Not’: The Radio Adventures of Laura (1944)’ by Frank Krutnik, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, vol. 5 no.2. Dec 2012
https://www.academia.edu/7280483/_Barbed_Wire_and_Forget-Me-Not_The_Radio_Adventures_of_Laura_1944_