"Hello, this is Jeanine Basinger, chairman of the Film Studies Program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut." "Here's the famous film from 1944, Laura." "With the first credit showing the stars," "Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb." "You're also experiencing two things that made Laura famous." "The beautiful portrait of Gene Tierney that's in the frame and the luscious and perfectly beautiful score written by David Raksin." "This is David Raksin." "We're running the film Laura and I am supposed to remember things about it which I doubt I can be prevented from doing." "I shall never forget the weekend Laura died." "That's one of the most famous opening lines in any film." ""I shall never forget the weekend Laura died."" "Delivered by Clifton Webb, who was nominated for best supporting actor and who was making his screen debut in sound films." "See that clock?" "You'll see it again." "It plays an important role." "Only one other clock in existence in Laura's apartment." "...and I had just begun to write Laura's story when another of those detectives came to see me." "And here's the leading man, Dana Andrews." "Dana Andrews, one of my favorite film persons." "The opening of this film, this scene establishes the two main male characters of the story." "This detective here, Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews who's exploring the beautiful apartment of the other man and his name is Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb." "He's narrating." "Always been very interesting to me that the person who's narrating this is a person who is dead." "And now the two men confront each other." "In this film, you can almost draw a line right straight down the middle." "One half belongs to Waldo, and there he is." "What an entrance, in his bathtub, typing." "And the other half belongs to this man, Mark McPherson." "In Waldo's half of the movie, Laura is presumed to be dead." "In Mark's half of the movie, Laura is found to be alive." "The two men are both obsessed by her and it is a story of their obsession with Laura and her beauty and their attempt to find out who, in fact, murdered her that covers the plot." "Now, there's a very funny look when Dana Andrews sees Clifton Webb getting out of the tub." "And Clifton Webb is not seen and Dana gives a sort of a little grimace." "From Sergeants McAvity and Schultz, I should find it intolerable." "Hand me that washcloth, please, Mr." "Mr." "McPherson." "These two men are perfect opposites." "Very well played by two excellent actors." "Clifton Webb, seen here, was originally a truly brilliant and famous Broadway singer/dancer a factor that most people who love him in the movies don't even realize." "Oddly, he never played a musical performer in any movie." "That's one of those ironies that abound." "In films, after this wonderful debut he almost always played some variation of the Waldo Lydecker character." "He always was witty, acerbic, a man of great taste and sophistication even when he played a father, as he did in Cheaper by the Dozen." "Or even when he played a priest, as he does in Satan Never Sleeps." "He was a cranky father and a very elegant priest." "Laura typecast him." "He did, however, become a leading man for a series that grew out of his hit movie Sitting Pretty in 1948 playing Mr. Belvedere in a series of two movies and this was later turned into a hit television series." "I do." "Dana Andrews is one of the most underrated leading men of the 1940s and 1950s." "When people talk about this movie, much is said about the haunting, brooding quality of Laura and of her beauty." "But take a good look at Dana Andrews." "Look at his eyes." "They have a haunting quality too." "He's enigmatic." "He's tense, he's offhand." "There's something slightly mysterious about him also." "And Dana Andrews plays him well." "He is, in fact, best remembered for this movie but also for Ox-Bow Incident and the great role he played as a veteran having problems adjusting to civilian life in The Best Years of Our Lives." "He has great assets for a screen actor." "He has a rich, beautiful voice, he's distinctive-looking he's very masculine, handsome." "He has an excellent ability to seem, on the one hand like a very nice, average, trustworthy guy." "And on the other hand turn it around and seem to be rather cruel rather arrogant and untrustworthy." "These characteristics are perfect for Mark McPherson because McPherson is tightly controlled." "Notice how he keeps himself under control playing with this little game that he has in his hand." "He's undemonstrative." "If he feels tense or emotional he drags out this toy to play with to control his reactions." "We learn from Waldo that Mark has been very brave as a policeman shot in the line of duty." "Yet we're going to see Mark fall in love with Laura with the dead woman and come under the spell of her atmosphere." "Andrews is also sexy, and his performances always contain an under-the-surface sense of highly charged emotions." "Here, the two lead characters go to the apartment of Ann Treadwell." "Notice, again, the amazing art direction." "The elegant clothes." "All the clothes were designed by Bonnie Cashin." "And they're the height of fashion for their day." "This is, of course, Judith Anderson." "She was a great classical actress." "She played a very, very famous female role of a villainous lady who killed off people and all that." "I can't remember the name of it, and I should." "Judith Anderson, who's playing Ann Treadwell first came to real notice in movies playing the frightening Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock." "She was Oscar-nominated for the role but actually lost out to Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath." "Judith Anderson was a highly respected actress in both theater and films ultimately becoming a dame of the British Empire." "She could play villains, as she did with Mrs. Danvers and in Lady Scarface." "She could play a sympathetic victim wife, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." "And she was a master at playing this type of brittle, sophisticated, yet vulnerable woman." "This is a great performance she gives in Laura." "Couple of checks went through your account, endorsed by him." "There's not a lot of music in this picture, maybe 35 minutes and that's not very much." "There's a place later which would have been inundated with music and I deliberately didn't do that." "Now we learn about Shelby, a secondary character on whom much of the suspicion falls for Laura's death." "We learn that Ann supports him, gives him money." "And soon Shelby will enter the frame and we will see that he is played by the great character actor who later became a star, Vincent Price." "In fact, Laura's interesting because it has two male character actors who began as supporting actors and who, against odds, ended up becoming legendary leading men," "Clifton Webb and Vincent Price." "Vincent Price was a well-educated man with a wide range of interests." "Here he comes." "Young, tall, handsome." "His interests included art and cooking." "He was the author of a cookbook." "He is, here, in the earliest stages of his career in which he was playing always weaklings or misguided playboys and sometimes a crazy comedy-relief figure." "He was a sort of second-string George Sanders in this period of his career." "He became famous for his raised eyebrow and his little wicked smile, not unlike George Sanders." "But he finally moved over to the period where he found his true fame when he began playing villains in horror films." "He reveled in his roles in horror films bringing to them humor and wit and tongue-in-cheek delight but never any real condescension." "The great thing about Vincent Price is he could be funny as well as sinister." "And he was always ironic." "He's very modern, and his work always holds up." "His career followed a trajectory." "He was first in all kinds of movies from murder mysteries like this to costume films like Song of Bernadette to dramas like Leave Her to Heaven to musicals like Up in Central Park." "Comedies, Champagne for Caesar." "Westerns, Baron of Arizona." "But finally in 1953 he was in André De Toth's House of Wax." "And that brought him to his natural milieu, the horror film." "And working with Roger Corman, William Castle he became really legendary." "This exterior was also used in the film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" "This is a standard 20th Century Fox set, and it does turn up in many movies." "And you can watch for it and see it again." "Now, this is a place where they might have had music in those days but I decided no way." "Here they are at Laura's apartment." "And when you enter Laura's apartment you again see the beautiful Oscar-nominated art direction and interior decoration that caused this film to be nominated." "The art director was Lyle Wheeler." "He had won an Academy Award for Gone With the Wind in 1939 and he would also win for Anna and the King of Siam in '46 for The Robe in 1953, for The King and I in '56 and for The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959." "He was, of course, nominated here for Laura, but he did not win." "He was also the art director on Hitchcock's Rebecca on Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement and many other Preminger films including Daisy Kenyon, River of No Return, In Harm's Way." "He had a talent for creating historically accurate sets, as in The Robe." "Now we focus on the portrait of Laura." "Not bad indeed." "Not bad indeed." "This famous portrait is actually a photograph." "And we have it in our archives, in Gene Tierney's archive in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives where we have the Gene Tierney papers." "Originally they did make an actual oil painting." "The original director, Rouben Mamoulian, had his wife, Azadia, paint one." "But when Otto Preminger took over direction from Mamoulian he didn't like the painting." "He thought it lacked the mystic, mysterious quality he wanted for the film." "So he sent Gene Tierney to the famous Fox house photographer Frank Polony to have a beautiful, mysterious photograph made." "Then they enlarged the photograph and brushed it so it would look like a painting." "So, in fact, the famous Laura portrait painting is actually the blowup of a photograph." "It's the famous portrait of Laura, which was done from a photograph." "They painted over the photograph." "And it certainly is quite beautiful." "Somebody inherited it, some guy." "As a matter of fact I don't even remember who it was, but I know he showed it to me." "In the black-and-white films designed by Lyle Wheeler, such as Laura he consciously used shadows, sharp and deep." "He worked with the cinematographer, knowing these things were gonna fall on his sets, and the characters that inhabited his sets were going to live in a world of shadows." "He was the supervising art director at 20th Century Fox from 1944 to 1960." "So he oversaw all the visual aspects of each film made there always working with the writer, the art director." "He approved all sketches and he scouted locations." "He was also a key figure in early color experiments." "And he was a very important man in developing designs for the CinemaScope frame also." "McPherson shows how cleverly he can control people." "But he does need to pull out his toy in order to remain calm." "I would have put music here but unfortunately I didn't have 67 trombones." "Now, this is a very interesting place where there's a little trio consisting of violin, piano and accordion." "I don't know what they were playing, but it wasn't Laura." "And I had to do it, you know, there, so I just tricked it so it looks like the guy's bow is going correctly and everything." "I remember we dined here the night before her 22nd birthday." "Just we two, happy, making plans for her future." "The camera moves slowly toward him, we fade into the past and have our first glimpse of Laura played by the exquisitely beautiful Gene Tierney." "One of the truly great faces of 1940s cinema." "Now, this is supposed to be Muzak." "Tierney said that Laura was the role most often associated with her career." "And she herself described Laura as," ""A woman of mystery and glamour, unattainable." ""The kind of woman I admired in the pages of Vogue as a young girl."" "Originally she was unenthusiastic about the role according to the notes in our archive." "She felt that her time on camera was less than she would like to have and as she put it, "Who wants to play a painting?"" " Now, this is..." " Young woman, either you have been raised in some incredibly rustic community where good manners are unknown or you suffer from the common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct." "I couldn't resist letting that play." "He delivers it so brilliantly." "But, you see, notice how Laura is costumed here." "She is dressed beautifully, elegantly." "She's very pretty." "But she is not the height of sophistication." "She is dressed as if she is a young girl just starting out her career." "This is important, because after Waldo enters her life and takes her over, she does begin to look very, very different." "This is supposed to be Muzak, and it went away from the theme and begins to play a version of the theme done, I think, as a waltz with a string orchestra." "Tierney said that working with Otto Preminger which she would do in several other movies, was hard." "She commented on how hard he drove his cast but also never failed to add that he drove himself equally hard." "She felt he was wonderful as a director." "Quote from Gene Tierney, "He was simply tireless." ""When the rest of the cast seemed ready to drop from exhaustion..." ""..." "Otto would still muster as much vigor as he had the day began."" "On her performance, Tierney said," ""I'm pleased that audiences still identify me with Laura." ""I never felt that my own performance was much more than adequate." ""Tributes, I believe, are for the character, the dreamlike Laura..." ""...rather than any gifts I brought to the role." ""I do not mean to sound modest." ""I doubt that any of us connected with the movie..." ""...thought it had a chance of becoming a kind of mystery classic..." ""...or ever enduring beyond its generation."" "That's a direct quote from Gene Tierney." "But Laura is one of those happy accidents of filmmaking." "The mystery of what will become a hit, much less become a classic." "It's like Casablanca in that regard." "It originally started out as a B film, was elevated to A status and through a series of accidents of casting and changing of director became one of those things that turned out to be great." "Just as Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan were originally to play the Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman roles in Casablanca John Hodiak was originally to play Mark McPherson either Hedy Lamarr or Jennifer Jones to play Laura." "Rouben Mamoulian was the original director, not Otto Preminger." "And Laird Cregar was considered to be one of the actors to play Waldo Lydecker." "Johnny, please tell the gentleman I'm busy." "In the end, they went with a leading man who was not yet considered a real lead, Dana Andrews and a key player who had not made a sound movie before this man, Clifton Webb." "This is a great scene." "As you notice the young man slowly moving up slowly moving up." "Staring, staring." "Butting in." "Getting closer, getting closer." "Soon Waldo will deal with him." "Here it comes." "If you come a little bit closer, my boy," "I can just crack your skull with my stick." "And now, for reasons which are too embarrassing to mention," "I'd like to endorse that pen." "Mr. Lydecker!" "Thank you." "This film was produced for the studio by Darryl F. Zanuck producer, writer, head of 20th Century Fox for years." "An important figure in film history, and one of the truly legendary moguls." "He's one of the most famous of the big studio tycoons." "And he was skilled in many areas." "From developing stars such as Betty Grable the box-office queen of the 1940s and being able to make great World War II escapist entertainment." "But he also took the studio in a new direction in this time period with message pictures such as Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky and The Snake Pit." "Waldo now tells how he shaped Laura's career." " We see Laura grow." " He's talking about Laura, of course so the music is playing the tune." "And it's supposed to add a little glamour." "This material was cut from the original release." "In it, we see how absolutely important Waldo was in shaping Laura's grooming, her clothes, the people she meets, et cetera." "Gene Tierney is exquisitely beautiful in this montage." "We see Laura beginning to dress in a more sophisticated way." "We return to Waldo to remind ourselves that he is telling us about Laura and shaping our image of her." "But Zanuck felt this was too much of a fashion parade and that it deterred the storytelling process." "And yet I knew Laura would never betray anyone." "Here's a beautiful scene." "Snow, cold." "Think about how smart they were in Hollywood about creating atmosphere." "This is a scene of Waldo's misery and unhappiness where he's gonna stand outside and spy on Laura." "There's many ways to do it, but what they choose to do is take the time to turn it into something where we feel the cold and misery and isolation and rejection that he's feeling by making it a scene of miserable weather in which he has to stand out in agony in his overcoat." "I demolished his affectations, exposed his camouflaged imitations of better painters, ridiculed his theories." "I did it for her, knowing Jacoby was unworthy of her." "It was a masterpiece because it was a labor of love." "Naturally, she could never regard him seriously again." "There were others, of course, but her own discrimination ruled them out before it became necessary for me to intercede" "until one night at a party at Ann Treadwell's." "It was one of her usual roundups of bizarre and nondescript characters corralled from every stratum of society." "This is Mr. and Mrs. Preston." "They've been waiting to meet you." "How do you do?" " Hello, Shelby." " Excuse me, honey." "You're Laura Hunt." " Yes?" " Hello." "I'm Shelby Carpenter." " Want to dance?" " I'm not alone." "Oh, him?" "I'll bet he's still doing the polka." "Excuse me, please." "Yes." "Betsy Ross taught it to me." " Hello, Waldo." "Darling, how are you?" " Hello, darling." " You've met Shelby." " Unavoidably." "He was awfully nice to me in Louisville..." "The theme song of this movie, of course, can be heard here." "Originally, Otto Preminger thought he would like to use George Gershwin's song Summertime from Porgy and Bess for the theme song." "And then he decided Duke Ellington's" "Sophisticated Lady would be perfect." "But David Raksin came up with the haunting melody that became the Laura theme." "It was turned into a popular song after the movie when Johnny Mercer added the famous lyrics," "Laura, she's the face in the misty light" "The footsteps That you hear down the hall" "The theme I wrote for Laura has had a life of its own." "It's sort of become a very, very big deal." "And later I converted it into a song, and Johnny Mercer wrote a lyric to it." "And that song has, as of now well over 400 different recordings, which is pretty good going." "The witty dialog that is particularly present in this scene is part of the contribution of Hoffenstein one of the major screenwriters that worked on this." "He was a poet, actually, who became a screenwriter in the last years of his life." "Originally, Preminger, who was going to produce the film not direct it, worked with Jay Dratler on a script." "But Preminger wasn't satisfied and got permission to hire Hoffenstein and Reinhardt to work." "Their adaptation, which was excellent moved the film up from B status to A status and Zanuck then became the executive producer." "Most people attribute the wonderfully sharp dialog delivered by Clifton Webb, which, as I said is so much a success of the movie, to this writing team." "But the movie has two great triumphs." "It's not just this witty, brittle, sophisticated dialog but also the ability of this writing team to create a dreamy romanticism and a great yearning on the part of characters inside the frame." "It's brittle and sophisticated..." "It's brittle and sophisticated..." "It's brittle and sophisticated and haunting and romantic." "And that's why it's so good." "It's good to remember that we are in a flashback here." "The flashback is one of the most popular narrative devices of the 1940s and of the film-noir movie." "A flashback is always used for a particular reason." "It wants to create a relationship with the viewer in which a character, through a flashback can explain, influence, control, shape and even deceive the audience about characters or information about characters." "There always needs to be a reason for a flashback." "It has to accomplish something that presumably could not be done as well any other way." "The old films knew there needed to be a reason to tell a story out of order and to bring the past visually on the screen." "So they would always consider who would be narrating whose point of view would be available how much time would be passing on the screen in the story while it was being told who would be listening, what's the purpose." "This is a masterful flashback." "There you go." "You now learn how he was spying on her always." "Now a little underscoring music, because there's a slightly dramatic scene here." "So the music is sort of messing around with that." "This is a flashback that allows us to have Gene Tierney who is presumably dead, enter the film and begin to participate in it." "Otherwise we would be going half the running time without ever seeing her." "It also has one other very clever purpose, it diverts suspicion from Waldo." "We're back to the tune." "But I'm playing around with it, you know so I don't repeat it too often hopefully." "There you are." "Read them." "Waldo, of course, is one of the obvious choices to consider to be the villain." "And he is the person, however, who tells us the story who presents Laura who we can see clearly adores her and is obsessed by her." "He's also witty sophisticated sophisticated sophisticated and seems to be a man who would not be the villain." "By establishing Waldo as one of the two protagonists seemingly and by allowing him to shape our vision of Laura initially and tell her story, all suspicion is diverted from him as a possible villain." "I should have told you before." "Shelby and I are going to be married next week." "The music, the Laura theme, is used perfectly to convey characterization to provide a sense of nostalgia and memory and to give a brooding atmosphere with underlying sexuality." "As I said, the score was one of the things that helped build this film to A status and to focus people on it." "Interestingly, the composition of the score for Laura was first offered to Alfred Newman, who turned it down and then offered to Bernard Herrmann, who turned it down." "They thought it was going to be just another detective movie and they were not interested in working on it." "David Raksin's great contribution was to see this movie essentially as a love story and a story of obsession in which Laura haunts two different men who remember her and think about her." "His score truly uplifted the film and did so much for it." "When I met with Preminger..." "Well, as a matter of fact, I met him for the first time, really met him the day after I went to the running with Darryl Zanuck, you know..." "Zanuck, who was the boss of the studio, in his little projection room and they ran the film." "And I saw immediately it was not a detective story, but a love story in a detective-story milieu." "And I was horrified to hear Darryl Zanuck who was a very, very astute cutter but he said that he was gonna take the big scene and he was gonna cut it severely." "He had already cut it." "And I heard myself, to my astonishment, say," ""Well, Mr. Zanuck, if you cut that, people are not gonna understand..." ""...that the detective is falling in love with Laura."" "And Zanuck, who had never seen me before because I'd never been to one of those meetings, turned to his cutter and said, "Who's that?"" "She said, "That's the composer."" "And I said, "Well, Mr. Zanuck, that scene needs music." ""Why don't you let me write some for it?" ""If it works, fine, if it doesn't, you know, you can get rid of it."" "He said, "Fair enough."" "The next day, after this evening running was the first time I met Preminger." "That's when he told me he was using Sophisticated Lady." "I told him it was wrong for the picture." "And he argued with me." "He said, "She's a whore."" "So I looked at him." "I said, "By whose standards?"" "He turns to Al Newman and says, "Where'd you find this fella?"" "He turns to Al Newman and says, "Where'd you find this fella?"" "He turns to Al Newman and says, "Where'd you find this fella?"" "But Al said to him, "Listen, Otto, you never know..." ""...what this guy's gonna come up with." "Why don't you just sort of let him go."" "So I did, and Al Newman and I played the tune for him together and Otto Preminger liked it at once, and it stayed in the picture." "And it became something of a hit on its own." "I called to tell you, Waldo, I'm frightfully sorry." "I can't have dinner with you tonight." "Oh, no, no." "I'm not sick." "I'm just dreadfully nervous." "This movie is in the tradition of the detective, murder-mystery whodunit film in that you have quite a few scenes in which there isn't much physical action." "A classic whodunit has scene to scene with conversations between suspects and between the detective and suspects as clues unfold and events happen that give you insight." "All through the flashback, we return to Waldo not just to remind ourselves that what we're seeing is his version of events but also to remind us that Mark McPherson is his listener that he is, in fact, receiving this information and is an equal partner in the presentation of the story of Laura." "It's just as important to know how obsessed Waldo is and how he sees her as it is to know that Mark McPherson is beginning to listen and become obsessed also." "It was my fault." "I should have stopped it somehow." "Waldo's narration has served to plant suspicion on Shelby and to emphasize the fact that Shelby is weak." "Now we focus on Mark and his own possible suspicion of Waldo." "Hello." "Mosconi's?" "This is Lieutenant McPherson, Homicide Bureau." "Now we see McPherson doing his job." "He's been fairly inactive, just a listener but now he begins his investigation." "Yeah." "I see." "Well, that's all I wanted to know." "Thanks." " She's here, McPherson, the maid." " Okay." " Come in, Miss Clary." " Never mind the "Miss Clary" stuff." "This woman is really wonderful." "This actress is Dorothy Adams." "She was very famous for playing domestics or working-class people, during this period of time." "She's very effective." "Notice how carefully she has been dressed." "The cross that hangs around her neck the perfect little touch for the character she's playing the loyal, devoted servant, the working-class moment who's tough, nevertheless, very tough and who continues her job even though Laura is gone." "What do you want to know?" "What we all want to know, who killed Laura Hunt." "How would I know?" "You don't think I done it?" "I know you cops get crazy notions..." "Look at the beautiful lighting in this minor moment in the film." "It has been lit as if it is the key moment, is as important as anything." "Look at the details." "The little figure on the shelf, the corner of the painting the costuming, the careful way that Dana Andrews listens to Bessie's tirade." "This film won the Oscar for best cinematography and it was done by Joseph LaShelle." "His first film as a cinematographer had only taken place one year before in 1943 a minor movie about the home front during World War II called Happy Land." "LaShelle, however, had worked in the movie business since 1924 and he continued working until 1969 in a long and distinguished career." "He was known as one of the most stylish of cinematographers." "He was a master at taking literature or theater pieces and moving them to the screen by experimenting with unusual angles and rich, deep lighting and by trying to translate the descriptions of places that were present in novels onto the screen." "Here, he has created an extremely specific world of sophistication." "Deep, beautiful shadows." "Not a single scene in this movie is without incredible lighting." "Such care, such detail." "His lighting and shadows make these sets look real." "They are, of course, decorated with great detail, but it's the lighting that takes the decorated edge off them and renders them lifelike." "That was true in the restaurant scene we just saw and it's true here in Laura's apartment." "A couple of highball glasses." "Here comes the cast of possible suspects, basically other than Laura herself when she turns up." "One of the great things about the way this movie is presented is that all three of these people are funny, witty, sympathetic and unlikable by turn." "This is a mark of Otto Preminger's directing." "He was a superbly talented director who liked to use long takes in movies such as in this scene in which the characters can be in the frame being who they are, and the audience can watch all of them equally and study their very coherent movements and conversations without a lot of interpretation, even when there is a cut." "These people sometimes seem really awful and other times they seem understandable." "What are you going to do?" "Sell them?" "I don't know." "I suppose so." "Thank you." "If I'm appointed administrator of the estate, I shall probably just call in Corey." "You mean Lancaster Corey, the art dealer?" "Yes." "He was a friend of Laura's." "Let him dispose of everything." "It'll be less gruesome that way." "Not quite everything, Ann." "This is actually a well-disguised scene of exposition in which Waldo tells us," ""I'll need this back, and, of course, my clock."" "Again, the clock, casually referred to." "Notice how cleverly they keep the clock in the story." "The clock is seen, the clock is mentioned, the clock is referred to and yet it all seems so casual that you couldn't possibly think there was anything significant to the clock." "Nothing is leaving here except you, Lydecker." "I think the next is a crucial scene in the picture, you know." "The scene in the apartment that's the scene that Zanuck was gonna cut further, having cut it." "And I persuaded him to let me write music for it, which I said would help the audience to understand what the detective is feeling." "And now these characters leave but they have been re-established for us as three main suspects as three people of questionable characters, but not unsympathetic." "...as three people of questionable characters, but not unsympathetic." "...as three people of questionable characters, but not unsympathetic." "Now we have movie rain." "This, of course, is a hallmark of the films that were later designated film noir." "At the time, it would have been called a detective movie or a crime movie." "These movies are famous for wet, dark streets and lots of rain." "Now McPherson comes into Laura's apartment in one of the great scenes of the movie." "The deeply shadowed, beautiful film." "And here's the portrait." "Here's the music." "He stands." "He looks." "The entire atmosphere of the room is permeated with a sense of Laura." "Her portrait, her music, the darkness, the shadows and the rain." "This is what you call movie atmosphere done at its absolute best." "McPherson moves into her apartment as if he belongs there, as if it's his." "He's loosened his tie." "He takes off his jacket." "He makes himself at home." "He sits down and starts to go through her things." "And something is bothering him." "And the haunting presence of Laura is what is on his mind." "Goes into her bedroom." "Notice how the camera stays with him all during this." "He's alone." "It's just us and him." "This is her bedroom." "He's gonna open a drawer, look at her things pull one of them out, a filmy scarf leaving us to imagine what else is in there, of course." "He's going to smell her perfume." "Everything about Laura is here." "He's experiencing it." "He's moving around, making himself at home, as I said looking at her clothes now but really feeling Laura." "It's upsetting him." "He doesn't have his little toy to keep himself calm." "Just walks around, thinks about everything." "Now, of course, gets himself a drink." "You notice he drinks quite a bit, in the great tradition of the 1940s detective." "And now, of course he goes to look again at the portrait." "The portrait and the music." "Always the portrait and the music, the haunting quality." "I had to come up with a theme, and it was over the weekend, as usual." "Friday I was talking to Preminger, and he said, "All right, my boy." ""If you feel you should write something else, write something else."" "So I did." "And I..." "I can write themes very, very fast lots and lots of them, but I didn't get any that I really cared for." "And on Saturday morning, over the weekend, I received a letter from the lady to whom I was married and with whom I was very much in love." "I couldn't figure out what she was saying so I folded it up and put it in the pocket of my work jacket." "And on Sunday evening, without thinking, I sort of reached into my pocket and pulled this thing out and said, "What's this?"" "I smoothed it out and put it on the piano and started to read it and it suddenly dawned upon me she was saying, "Farewell, buddy."" "And that hit me very hard and believe it or not, corny as it may seem that's when I started to play the theme on the piano." "Now, if you saw that in a Warner Bros. picture you'd know it was phony, but it isn't." "My music always has a strain of melancholy in it including places where it probably shouldn't." "McPherson, did it ever strike you that you're acting very strangely?" "It's a wonder you don't come here like a suitor, with roses and a box of candy," "I was just doing very well in my career." "I was not known by the public but I was certainly generally known in my own profession and had a very good reputation." "I was actually assigned to this film by Al Newman, who decided that since it had had trouble while it was working..." "They had to stop and shoot stuff over." "He didn't wanna bother with it." "So he elected to do another movie, but he conducted this one and did a marvelous job of it and liked the music very much." "And so from then on, I had a career of my own going." "Before that I was known in the profession, but nobody else knew me." "But from then on, you might say it was a calling card." "I don't think they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse." "That's one of the main things that people discuss about Laura that, in fact, this woman is dead, or so we all believe so he believes, and yet he's become obsessed by her." "Now comes the moment." "He's been drinking." "He's been wandering in her apartment." "It's dark, it's rainy." "He's alone, he's upset and angered by Waldo." "He sits down in the chair the music swells up, the portrait is well lit." "Again, we're allowed to soak up the atmosphere to participate in the feeling." "The feeling..." "The depth of feeling of this image, the care that is taken with this in every way, and the time that is given to it." "Now he falls asleep." "And he is asleep." "He lets go of the camera." "The camera, which has kept him so close moves away from him, completely away from him." "He's not active." "Sound." "Off-screen sound." "Sound." "Off-screen sound." "We hear it." "We cut, and we see Laura as she appeared in Waldo's flashback the last moment we saw her." "She enters, she turns on the light, he wakes up and the shock hits him." "What are you doing here?" "Many people discuss this as a dream sequence and as almost a sense that in fact, he, since we saw him fall asleep is dreaming about Laura and dreaming that she's alive." "This, of course, was a tradition of the 1940s films." "Often people fell asleep in chairs, had dreams and then woke up and we found that none of what we'd invested in had actually happened." "That is not the case in this film, but there is the dreamlike atmosphere suggested and hinted." "Quickly, Mark becomes a detective and starts analyzing the situation for her and cleverly covering all plot questions that the audience might have about why she did not call where she has been, why she didn't know anything about it." "It's very good screenwriting." " Do you have any idea who it was?" " No." "Gene Tierney, beautifully lit here." "Again, Joseph LaShelle." "He had worked up from lab assistant, through camera operator, et cetera." "He knew every step of lighting every step of anything to do with cinematography." "Some of his other famous movies were How Green Was My Valley The Song of Bernadette The Long, Hot Summer, The Apartment." "He was considered a very flexible cameraman able to work equally well in black-and-white or color and skilled at comedy, drama, outdoor Westerns, whatever." "Joseph LaShelle, who won the Oscar for best cinematography in this movie was nominated for an Oscar 15 times which makes him one of the all-time most-honored artists in film history." "Beautiful, wasn't she?" "Do you suppose..." "Sit down, please." "This is Monday night." "You left on Friday." "Rather a long weekend, isn't it?" "The original director of this film, Rouben Mamoulian was a very talented director of both film and theater." "He was the original director of stage musicals such as Oklahoma!" "... ...Carousel, Silk Stockings." "In his movie career, he only made 14 movies but they were all excellently directed and tastefully mounted." "He was also a key innovator in the transition to sound period." "But in this movie, working on this movie, he clashed with Otto Preminger, who was the named producer." "And although he'd shot a decent relatively significant portion of the movie Preminger claimed never to have used a single frame." "There are different opinions on this, but since this movie is so coherent has such a definite style and feeling to it, I think we have to assume that it is very much all Preminger's vision and decision." "Which does not mean, of course, that the other contributors the screenwriter, the cinematographer the designers, were not key people in creating the film." "It just means that Preminger guided it all together." "How else did the girl get into the apartment?" "You knew she was in love with Carpenter, that he'd given her your cigarette case." "You know all that, don't you?" "I knew that she was in love with him." "She told me so herself." " When did she tell you?" " At lunch last Friday." "I also know she meant nothing to Shelby." "I understand him better than you do." "Now we get to see Laura, not as Waldo describes her for us and presents us for her, but as she is or at least as McPherson sees her and encounters her." "She's not a weak person, she is not easily dominated." "My own safety?" "Do you suspect me?" "I suspect nobody and everybody." "I'm merely trying to get at the truth." "Here's a beautiful medium close-up of the exquisite Gene Tierney." "Her beauty and its exotic quality do so much to create the mood and atmosphere and to make this film work." "She isn't just an ordinary beautiful woman she's an exotically beautiful woman." "Sorry, Miss Hunt, but I must insist you do as I say." "She was never thought of as a particularly great actress although she was nominated for an Oscar for her work in Leave Her to Heaven." "But the interesting thing is how effective she always is in every film she plays in particularly when she was directed by Otto Preminger." "I know that you went away to make up your mind whether you'd marry Shelby Carpenter or not." "Preminger, as a director, truly appeals to connoisseurs of film style." "Although he had directed films prior to Laura this was his first really big success as a director." "His career easily divides into two sections." "First, where he's a house director at 20th Century Fox although a big-name one, and where he constantly had to fight for control of his films with Darryl Zanuck." "In the second phase..." "In the second phase..." "In the second phase he became a successful and dominant independent producer/director who operated independently of the studio system." "Despite all the battles with Zanuck at Fox his work during the years he was there which was approximately 1936 through 1954..." "The work is excellent, and it's perfectly represented by Laura." "Now Laura is brought into play as a suspicious character." "And we see her meeting with Shelby with them talking in the car in the rain and we know that something is going to happen." "Now suspicion begins to fall in a wider circle." "Since the tradition of this type of movie is to have a femme fatale or a woman that can't be trusted, it works very well to have a sense that Laura herself is someone who cannot be trusted." "This is just, you know, mystery-film music." "Again, we've now moved away from Waldo." "Having had his story having had the key scene in which he warns Mark that he's becoming in fact, a necrophiliac detective, we move toward other characters and increase suspicion on them." "In this particular scene, of course, Shelby who has gone to Laura's cottage, her escape place to look for the gun." "Or to look for a gun." "Or to look for something." "Or to do something." "But whatever it is, we're suspicious, and it is the gun." "But Mark has followed him." "Again, it's good to notice the wonderful art direction of this movie." "In this particular set, which is only going to be used briefly they could have been so casual in creating it." "It is, after all, a second home for her out in the country." "But when the camera moves so that you can see everything again, it's marvelously decorated." "It's created very much not only as a home but it's reflecting of what you have seen that would have been Laura's taste in her main apartment done here in a more country-home setting." "So there's an incredible unification between the set direction here at the country home and the apartment in New York." "Again, it's as if she has put all these items out." "They are hers personally." "They reflect her desire to create a home, a place that reeks of her and her atmosphere." "And that's also true here." "Notice there's no music at all here." "We are not under the spell of her portrait and her music here." "And this is a real confrontation scene between one of the main suspects, Shelby, and Mark McPherson." "All detective movies have to have scenes like this." "The question is how well directed will they be how well written will they be, and how well acted will they be?" "Or will the audience just wait for them to go away?" "This is a good one because both actors manage to keep within their characters and give us a very strong sense of forward movement in the story." "You know, she thought..." "Well, she thought she was in love with me." "Sympathy for Shelby is brought forward here." "His story begins to seem logical." "And suddenly it's like, "Maybe he didn't do it."" "In the novel Laura, written by Vera Caspary..." "Laura was both a stage play and a novel." "...there were five sections to the story, in which Waldo narrated one and very definitely made Shelby suspicious one narrated by McPherson, in which Laura was found to be alive a transcript of Shelby's statement a point of view of Laura, who also narrated her story and then, of course, the final climax, epilogue and solution." "The film tightened this up, of course." "It speeded events forward and just has the two men, Waldo on the one side when she's believed to be dead, and McPherson on the other." "What it has done, really, is eliminate Laura's point of view." "Having a simpler structure makes it harder for the viewer to get ahold of motives." "And Preminger's careful direction that moves us to suspect one person and then another equally, maintains a balance in ambiguity that makes this a very mature and intelligent detective film." "Not only for myself, but for Laura." "In a panicky sort of way, I felt I must keep out of this to keep Laura out of it." "I know now how foolish and hopeless it was, but there was only one thing on my mind, the safety of a person whose life was dearer to me than my own." "Don't you understand that?" "Did you think Laura had done it?" "Did you?" "Suspicion toward Laura is beginning to mount." "And, of course that's one of the directions that the screenplay is going." "On Saturday, when our men went to the hotel to tell you that Laura was dead," " you seemed sincerely shocked." " I was." "I hadn't expected that mistake." "But you had your alibi ready, no matter who was dead." "Yet you knew the minute Laura got back it wouldn't stick." "Don't you see?" "I was incapable of thinking that far ahead." "I was incapable of thinking at all." "I was groping for some way to keep Laura's name out of it." "Shelby has been presented as a weak character." "So we're not sure whether he is really weak here or just lying." "I told her the whole story, just as I've told you." "She phoned you after she promised me she wouldn't call anybody." "What did she want?" "It's perfectly natural she'd want to see me, especially after what's happened." "Why don't you tell the truth?" "She sent you here to get rid of this gun." "Now McPherson is cleverly checking to see if the radio really was broken as Laura said it was." "And, of course, it isn't." "Again, another reason to suspect Laura herself." "Notice, again, how cleverly they deflect our suspicion from Waldo who has more or less disappeared briefly from the movie while we double our worries about Laura and whether or not she was the person who killed Diane Redfern." "I always love movie rain." "This is really good movie rain." "It's coming down thick and heavy." "See, there are no phony little snippets of music there." "Again, we are at Laura's apartment." " What's that?" " Breakfast." "He lets her know that he's perfectly aware that she went out and what happened." "They go in the kitchen, and notice how beautifully lit the kitchen is." "There is nothing left undone in this movie." "There is no time in which everything is not impeccably presented and coherently presented." "My mother always listened sympathetically to my dreams of a career and then taught me another recipe." "And Laura is a surprising woman." "She's not just a femme fatale, she knows how to cook." "And here's poor Bessie, wearing, of course, the same outfit as this is a one-outfit role if there ever was one." "It's all been a mistake, Bessie." "I'm not a ghost." "Really." "I found you, and you were dead." "It was Miss Redfern's body you found." "Now we see how much Bessie loves and admires Laura." "Since she's been working for her we then get a sense of Laura as a good person." "The balance of presentation is excellent in this film." "After building suspicion about Laura for the last couple of scenes now we see Laura's good to Bessie." "And furthermore, Laura knows how to cook." "These are all good things for women in the movies." "Somebody should have warned her." "Poor Bessie." "By the way, I've asked Waldo Lydecker to come here this morning." "Now we're going to see what happens when Waldo comes." "I'm not doing it for fun." "Why did you break your promise and go see Shelby last night?" "The great thing about the direction of Otto Preminger which is so perfect for this movie is that he really asks the audience to decide for itself which character it most sympathizes with in this movie or admires, or even believes." "This style of filmmaking is called "objective."" "Of course, it's never really objective, since it is all being shaped but we are given an opportunity here to make decisions." "Here comes Shelby." "And to our surprise, they are back together again." "Preminger made other movies at Fox," "Whirlpool, Angel Face, Fallen Angel Where the Sidewalk Ends, Daisy Kenyon, Forever Amber That Lady in Ermine, River of No Return." "All of his films have this characteristic of letting an audience make decisions." "He always treated the audience with great respect and assumed that the audience was intelligent." "Preminger was famous for saying that if you're going to adapt something to the screen, don't do a great novel like War and Peace go out and get yourself a potboiling bestseller and then you won't disappoint the reader." "Here comes Waldo." "And here comes Waldo's shock." "Waldo." "He collapses." "Now we see Waldo sympathetically." "He's vulnerable." "He's weak." "Again, seeing him this way diverts suspicion from him." "His obviously caring for Laura." "He's ill." "Of course, it could be he's collapsing, you know, because he's the murderer." "There's the clock in the background again." "That is a very good way Preminger has of shifting our suspicions and ideas around." "This movie was nominated for five Oscars." "For best supporting actor, Clifton Webb best direction, Otto Preminger best screenplay, best cinematography and best art direction for interior design." "It won one Oscar, the one for best cinematography by Joseph LaShelle." "But this is a beautiful, elegant film with a very distinguished cast." "And I think of it as a typical film of the 1940s." "It's a little bit better, a little bit more elegant than others but it represents the period and it represents the category of film noir." "It's an old family custom." "Now we learn that Waldo has arranged a party." "And at the party which is the traditional finale of any detective film in which all suspects are brought together, is going to happen." "Characteristics of Preminger's directorial style include very few reaction shots, fluid camera movements long takes, no flashy cutting or montage sequences and always impeccable compositions with elegant settings and costumes and truly imaginative casting." "Some of these things are apparent here and others not so much because this is the beginning of his career." "Now the music." "The popular song is, in fact still going to be heard as background music." "David Raksin came to Hollywood in 1935 with an excellent musical background." "A very well-educated man." "His father had operated a music store and also conducted accompaniment to silent films." "Over his first six years in Hollywood Raksin arranged, adapted and wrote music for a very large number of features, shorts, cartoons, documentaries including a major assignment from Alfred Newman who needed someone to work with Charlie Chaplin on the score he wanted to create for Modern Times." "Chaplin had an excellent sense of music in films and he could create lovely melodies." "But he couldn't write music and he couldn't even play the piano." "So he needed help." "Raksin's big breakthrough was with the score for this film." "The irony that he was nominated for an Oscar and didn't win is not lost on most film historians because the score for Laura is as famous as that of any movie." "And it is often used to teach beginners what effective use of film music could be or should be." "Other scores that Raksin did that are highly regarded are his scores for The Bad and the Beautiful, Will Penny, and Force of Evil." "Raksin's scores are also considered highly modern or even slightly ahead of their time." "And, of course, they hold up today." "Here's one of my favorite scenes in this movie and one of the great scenes between two women that appears in any movie." "Let's watch." "McPherson suspects Shelby." "He seems to suspect me too." "And so do some of my friends." "You?" "Don't be absurd." "You could never do a thing like that." "And Shelby?" "I don't think he did it, but he's capable of it." "Are you as interested in McPherson as he is in you?" "But, Ann, I only met him last night." "That's more than long enough sometimes." "Gene Tierney is given the key light." "She's turned forward so we concentrate on her face." "But watch Judith Anderson." "Listen to Judith Anderson." "He's no good, but he's what I want." "I'm not a nice person, Laura." "Neither is he." "He knows I know he's just what he is." "He also knows that I don't care." "We belong together because we're both weak and can't seem to help it." "That's why I know he's capable of murder." "He's like me." "No, dear, I didn't." "That is an impeccable performance." "As she puts on her makeup straightens her hair and pulls down her veil what she is doing is as natural-looking as anything you'd ever see in the movies, but she's presenting a grim truth." ""I am capable of murder." ""I didn't do it, but I could have."" "I love that scene." "It's also a great example of directorial style." "Gene Tierney is the star." "She is turned toward the camera and placed in the light and is just reacting and listening." "But the emphasis on Judith Anderson is done with great balance and presentation." "Now everyone waits to see who, in fact, will be arrested." "You'll see when I come in." "Right." "See you later." "Audiences always laugh at that." "Everybody's apprehensive." "Is it Judith Anderson?" "Is it Vincent Price?" "Is it Clifton Webb?" "Or..." "It's Gene Tierney." "Yes." "Oh, Bessie, poor Bessie." "She's got her maid's uniform on." "It's a two-outfit role." "Not Miss Hunt." "Please!" ""Thank you, Bessie."" "Thank you, Bessie." "Thank you." "Gene Tierney is wearing one of the costumes designed for her by Bonnie Cashin." "Later, of course, Gene Tierney's costumes were all designed by her husband, Oleg Cassini." "But these clothes are remarkable for how well they hold up." "Except for those exceedingly odd hats that she walks around in where they're folded back from her forehead everything could actually be worn today." "Try to prove her guilty." "Get on the witness stand with your poor shreds of evidence." "I'll expose your cheap methods you used on her." "Laura was remade twice for television." "In 1953, with the beautiful Dana Wynter playing Laura George Sanders playing Waldo Lydecker and Robert Stack playing Mark McPherson and directed by the stylist John Brahm." "This is a great moment, where Shelby sees which side his bread is buttered on and decides to go back to Ann." "Come in." "Sit down." " That'll be all, Gallagher." " Yes, sir." "Now, see, under certain circumstances there would've been music leading into this." "But I couldn't do it, I just couldn't do it." "Too corny." "Laura was also remade for television in 1968 starring Jacqueline Kennedy's sister, Lee Radziwill, as Laura." "That version has more or less disappeared from the world but the Dana Wynter version can be seen on the Fox Movie Channel network in the show Hour of Stars." "It's quite a wonderful piece, actually." "Not as good as this in any way but very interesting." "And the comparison is wonderful." "So look for that Hour Of Stars on the Fox Movie Channel." "Then why..." "Why did you tell me the radio at your country place was broken?" " Because it was broken." " Not when I tried it." "Just as I was leaving the village, I asked the local handyman to fix it." "How did he get in?" "I always leave a key under the flowerpot on the porch." "You're too intelligent to make up something I could check so easily but you're intelligent enough to have broken it yourself to..." "The fact that McPherson is a man that just can't trust women and just can't really get over the fact that it might be her and he is obsessed with her, comes out in this scene." "Again, with the remarkable lighting." "Notice the two lights in the upper left-hand frame." "The beautiful shadow here of him leaning over her." "This is a love scene, and a very strange one indeed since he is interrogating her under hot lights at the police station." "This is what you call a modern kind of love story in which the man makes love to the woman by accusing her of murder and by grilling her to make absolutely sure that she can, in fact, be trusted." "Or did you agree to pretend you had?" "Was that it?" "She's vulnerable." "He explains it all to us." "But again, the exposition that's contained in that or in the form of his grilling her which automatically makes it more interesting to us as viewers because we don't really know what is gonna happen here." "Now he asks a question that has nothing really to do with the murder." ""Are you in love with him?"" "Obviously he asks her because he is in love with her." "And now we know it's over." "It's not Laura." "That's what I wanted you to think." "You and a few others." "I didn't even book you." "You mean this was some sort of a game?" "I was 99% certain about you but I had to get rid of that one percent doubt." "It's a good question." "But, of course, it wouldn't be as interesting in a movie if he didn't do it." "Now she forgives him." "And we see that they are going to be together." "I'll call a cab for you." "Now we're moving toward the finale of the film." "Laura's going to arrive home." "We're going to re-establish that her apartment is being watched." "This reminds us of the guys in the basement." "And now we begin to finally focus on Lydecker." "And now we begin to finally focus on Lydecker." "And now we begin to finally focus on Lydecker." "After allowing him to narrate the first half of the movie in fact, be the hero, or at least the semi-protagonist of the first half and then diverting suspicion from him, now we focus on Waldo Lydecker." "Again, we follow McPherson in an apartment." "But here it isn't atmospheric, haunting." "He's businesslike, he's crisp." "The camera watches him, follows him and as he moves, the clock chimes." "Suddenly he focuses on the clock." "The clock has been with us in the frame from the very beginning of the movie." "The twin clocks, one here and one at Laura's subtly put forward so that it isn't jumped on us out of nowhere." "Movies really know how to plant things visually." "It's a little bit wonderful how quickly he finds the problem." "But then, you know, it's not totally unbelievable either." "And certainly the clock has been mentioned often enough by Waldo." "There we go." "And here is nothing." "It still doesn't make sense to me, Laura." "We move over to Waldo and Laura." "Now Waldo is upset because he realizes that Laura, in her way has yet again fallen in love or begun to focus on a man other than Waldo." "There's the clock at her house." "Reminds us again, very subtly that there's another clock with a hiding place." "...as if he were waiting for me." "Do you know what he calls women? "Dames."" "A "dame" in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of him." " His very words." " That doesn't mean anything." "He isn't like that." "Laura, you have one tragic weakness." "With you, a lean, strong body is the measure of a man and you always get hurt." "No man is ever going to hurt me again." "Now Laura asserts herself." "She realizes that Waldo plays this game with her over and over." "Laura is not a weak character in this film." "...except what he wants most, he loses his self-respect." "It makes him bitter, Laura." "Now we begin to realize, in fact, Waldo is the problem." "Until recently people have heard stories, film historians have been told stories about how Preminger's version of the film's ending was shot." "And there have been different endings suggested." "One in which it did, actually, turn out to be a dream sequence which no one believes was actually there." "And one in which we have learned earlier that Laura really does respect and appreciate what Waldo has done for her and she does not want him to be hurt." "She sets up a scene in which she tries to hide the gun and persuade Waldo to flee." "And she tries to help him get away." "But, in fact, he still comes back to kill her." "So that version, McPherson doesn't kill Waldo they just capture him." "No one really knows exactly whether these endings were ever shot although Preminger says he did shoot a second ending." "So we don't know exactly what the facts of that matter are." "That will be something that some enterprising film historian will find out for us." "But from the beginning we've been very much deflected away from suspicion of Waldo." "The voice-over at the beginning in which he talks to us about remembering the day she dies helps also to set up his innocence for us." "And we don't have a lot of people to suspect." "He would, of course, be one of the key ones so that was a clever device in screenwriting to help us." "Now we see Waldo pause on the stairs." "Look at the beautiful shadows." "And look at his face." "He looks back, and we know that he's hatching a plan." "It was the most difficult thing I ever had to do in my life." "All I need is the gun." "McPherson, ever the detective, knows all he needs is the gun." "He goes and finds the clock." "She didn't know it had a hiding place." "He now finds it." "And indeed, there is the gun." "So McPherson now understands exactly what has happened." "Have you ever seen this before?" "The clock is ticking, ticking, ticking." "It all begins to come into place." "In case we don't get it, he tells us." "The music is low behind." "See, this is a very difficult kind of scoring." "You've gotta do something which is, in a suppressed way, dramatic." "And that's what there is." "Raksin, in his later years, became associated with teaching classes in film music theory and technique." "One of the things I always appreciate about David Raksin is he's said to be the man who when Alfred Hitchcock said there could be no musical score for his film Lifeboat because they were out in the middle of the ocean and as Hitchcock said, "Where would the musicians be?" ""Where would the music come from?"" "And Raksin said, "Well, the same place as the camera."" "Always a wonderful story." "I couldn't make myself believe that..." "That's another one of the little fragments, melodics." "See, this score is a monothematic score." "There's almost no other music in it." "What there is is these little fragments of music which I put in which are intended, you know, to add a little depth and glamour without really changing the thing." "I'm as guilty as he is, not for anything I did, but for what I didn't do." "Now we are presented with Laura as a sympathetic woman but reminded that Waldo has not left the building and we see him turn and head back." "I can't understand why you've tried so hard to protect Shelby the last few days." "I was nearly frantic for fear you'd arrest Shelby." "I knew he wasn't guilty." "He hasn't enough courage to kill a fly." "And Waldo was doing everything he could..." "We're now told what, in fact, we already have seen but the objective balance that was given to it before is now reshaped for us as explanation and motivation." "This is one of those odd things that he does, in fact, put the gun back in the clock to have it all picked up tomorrow." "You sort of wish he had taken it with him." "He makes sure she's locked in but he's doing that thing that movie people do which is the equivalent of going down to the basement or up to the attic." "He's leaving her alone, knowing that Waldo is on the loose." "Of course, the film has clearly established for us..." "Of course, the film has clearly established for us..." "Of course, the film has clearly established for us there's someone watching outside and there are the men in the basement listening to her phone calls." "So on that basis, it seems logical." "And very quickly, that will be resolved." "Now we are alone with Laura in her apartment." "Again, now the clock, fully established for what it is her music and her portrait her space, her beautiful apartment with her beautiful things the sense of her as this mysterious and wonderful woman." "She turns out the lights and goes alone into her bedroom and we see she is alone." "And now swish pan over to the kitchen door which everybody conveniently forgot Waldo would have a key to or be able to enter through." "And here is Waldo." "Waldo has told us earlier to be sure and listen to his broadcast." "So we know that there is a broadcast to be arranged to be listened to." "That's good screenwriting and explaining how he will cover his own entrance." "And everyone assumes he's at the broadcast which is one of the reasons they're not worried for him." "But because the gun is still there, he is able to bring it out." "The clock chimes, always the clock." "Now she knows it's time to listen to Waldo's broadcast and she goes to turn on the radio which is beautifully built into her wall in a very modern, modernistic way for the day." "Waldo's voice." "And thus, as history has proved, love is eternal." "It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout centuries." "Love is stronger than life." "It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death." "I close this evening's broadcast with some favorite lines from Dowson." "Now Waldo will quote Dowson's Days of Wine and Roses as he prepares to murder her as he speaks of love, the importance of love and as he tells us once again, indirectly, that he loves Laura." "Now we find out that he didn't leave." "So they start checking for him." "Laura's listening." "And Waldo appears, beautifully lit." "Then closes within a dream..." " That's the way it is, isn't it, Laura?" " Waldo!" "You have heard the voice of Waldo Lydecker by electrical transcription." "In those days, the explanation would be necessary." "How could he be narrating and not be present?" "So they make sure we understand it was electrical transcription which is what a recording was called then, for radio release." "Do you think I could bear the thought of him holding you in his arms..." "And now Waldo's obsession comes forward and his inability to ever allow her to have any life other than with him." "He'll find us together, Laura, as we always have been..." "But Laura doesn't collapse, she tries to save herself." "She runs forward, and now comes the big finale." "Waldo lurching forward, being shot, dying, falling and saying, "Goodbye, Laura."" "His entire life..." "And there's the clock." "...was taken up with his obsession with Laura." "Good-bye, my love." "And goodbye, my audience." "Thank you very much for watching the movie with me." "Thank you." "Accompanying the recognizable 20th Century Fox logo is the equally recognizable orchestral fanfare two years before the merger with Fox Films." "Then we hear the Fox orchestra play the Laura theme..." "This lovely and haunting melody has endured over the decades and continues to be played and recorded." "This is Rudy Behlmer speaking." "We'll be spending the next hour and a half delving into the evolution of the stylish Laura from its inception through play, then novel, film and beyond." "Most of the information is based on various drafts of the script story conference notes, correspondence autobiographical books and several interviews that I was fortunate to have back in the late 1970s with people who are very much part of Laura both in front of and behind the camera in addition to Laura's author, Vera Caspary." "Now, before going any further if by chance you haven't seen the 1944 film before or you haven't seen it in a long time and you don't know or recall details of the plot I strongly recommend that you watch and listen to the film soundtrack before checking out this commentary track." "After all, Laura is in part a mystery in addition to being much more." "So I'll be referring early on to information you really don't want to be privy to until after you've seen the picture and heard the entire picture." "So let's begin at the beginning." "In 1939, novelist, playwright and screenwriter Vera Caspary had been struggling for an idea about a story about a detective who falls in love with a presumably dead, idealized woman whose life he investigates." "But she didn't know how to solve the problem until she read an item in the newspaper about a young woman whose face was destroyed in an explosion." "Now it was solved." "Vera Caspary's heroine wasn't killed at all." "Another person, whom everyone presumed to be Laura was to have her face blown away by gunfire." "And later, Laura would come back to confront the lovelorn detective." "With these elements in mind Caspary wrote a play, but she was dissatisfied with it." "The basic situation was worked out, acts one and two but act three and the solution were not right." "And she had not found the cynical columnist Waldo Lydecker." "Putting the manuscript in a suitcase, she went to Hollywood." "Quote, "I don't know when or how I discovered Waldo but I thought of the character during some ordeals in the studios." "And there came to mind the real killer the man who does away with what he can't possess," end of quote." "The author didn't know anyone who would shoot a woman whom he couldn't own." "So for a while the character eluded her." "Vera Caspary denied that Waldo was based upon Alexander Woollcott." "Now, Woollcott was a well-known critic, commentator and occasional actor who achieves strong influence on literary tastes beginning in the 1920s thanks to his strong-willed, iconoclastic and witty observations." "Caspary told me that she had been reading several of Woollcott's books while living in a house in Studio City near Hollywood whose owners had a Woollcott collection so that she let herself be influenced by Woollcott's style." "Quote, "Then I discussed the character with my friend, writer Ellis St. Joseph." "And he was so fascinated that he sat up with me night after night discussing the life and habits of the man." "He was Waldo." "Of course, he would never murder anyone." "But my understanding of the character was deepened by Ellis' conversations," end of quote." " Did I?" " Yeah." "When I spoke to Ellis St. Joseph about Laura he told me that his good friend Vera Caspary did have Alexander Woollcott in mind when they first began to talk about the book." "Quote, "But the world of Waldo was not Vera's world and I was able to discuss and describe aspects of that kind of person to her in considerable detail," end of quote." "Well, as time went on, he noted Waldo became increasingly villainous in Vera's eyes." "Quote, "She was not sure how to present the story in narrative form and I suggested that she read Wilkie Collins' novel, The Moonstone and use that technique," end of quote." "Vera Caspary confirmed this to me." "The Moonstone, the 1868 novel is often called the first detective novel." "This recounting of the theft of the fictitious moonstone diamond is told by several different people who are judged best able to describe the various phases of the solution of the novel's plot." "In the Laura novel the events came to be described in the first person by Waldo then by Mark McPherson, the detective and finally in the last third of the book by Laura." "The book was published in early 1943 to great success having been previously serialized in Collier's magazine in October and November of 1942 under the title Ring Twice for Laura." "A synopsis of the serial appeared in the mimeograph story bulletins of all the major studios prior to the book's publication." "This was standard operating procedure." "Although it was recommended by some of the analysts in the story departments apparently, no producer or executive was interested." "Vera Caspary recalled that Hollywood's indifference did not break her heart as she was working on the second version of the play at the time." "Meanwhile, her agent, Monica McCall, who was handling the dramatic rights had given a typescript of the book to a Broadway producer and director who liked the story and wanted not only to produce it but to collaborate with Caspary on the revised play." "Caspary said, "I was flattered because he had a Broadway reputation because he offered all of his middle European charm along with an elegant lunch." "His name was Otto Preminger." "You collapsed when you identified the body." "I can understand that." "A shotgun loaded with buckshot at close range..." "Mr. Preminger did not agree with me about one element in the dramatization." "He wanted to make it a conventional detective story." "I saw it as a psychological drama about people involved in a murder." "We fell out over this and I asked my old friend and collaborator, George Sklar playwright and novelist, to work with me," end of quote." "Years later, when asked what particularly interested him about Laura Preminger responded, quote, "The gimmick." "A girl you thought was dead automatically becomes a murder suspect by walking into her own apartment," end of quote." "Why, no, I'm..." "I'm very fond of Mr. Carpenter, of course." "Everybody is." " I'm not." "I'll be hanged if I am." " Don't be so annoying, Waldo." "Director Otto Preminger was born in Vienna, Austria." "He was a former law student and one-time assistant to German stage director Max Reinhardt." "He did direct some German films and then came to America to stage plays on Broadway." "During World War II, he actually performed as an actor playing Nazis in The Pied Piper in 1942, Margin for Error and They Got Me Covered, both in 1943." "Later on, he played a Nazi in Billy Wilder's film Stalag 17:" "After his contract at Fox Preminger became independent in the early '50s and directed such films as Carmen Jones The Man With the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder Exodus and In Harm's Way, among many others." "After all, it is my money." "I can do as I please with it." "Of course." "Now on Friday night, you stayed home alone all evening." "Yes." "Why didn't you go to the concert with Shelby?" "Because he didn't ask me." "We were just talking about you, Carpenter." "What a coincidence to find you here." " This is Lt. McPherson." " How do you do, lieutenant?" "I didn't know you were here, Mr. Carpenter." "As a matter of fact, I was just lying down here." "My hotel room was so hot." "And then all the people and reporters and telephone." "You know how it is, lieutenant." "I've hardly slept a wink since it happened." "Is that a sign of guilt or innocence, McPherson?" "I'm at your disposal." "I'm as eager to find the murderer as you are." "But what possible motive could I have for killing Laura?" "Miss Hunt and I were to be married this week, you know." "No, he doesn't know, and neither do I, or you, or anyone else alive." "What do you mean by that?" "Laura had not definitely made up her mind to marry him." "She told me so herself last Friday when she called to cancel our dinner engagement." "As a matter of fact, she was going to the country to think it over." "She was extremely kind..." "Despite the success of the novel backers stayed away from the play project." "Marlene Dietrich, who had read the book expressed interest in playing the role in a film." "Vera Caspary said, "it seemed odd casting, but George Sklar and I dazzled by Marlene in blue jeans and quantities of perfume decided that with certain adjustments, the idea was not impossible." "In character, this beautiful woman came closer to the independent girl who earned her living and pampered her lovers than anyone else who has yet played the part," end of quote." " I'll have a look." " Perhaps I could help you?" "All right." "Come along." "I'll be seeing you, Mrs. Treadwell." "Since the writers still wanted a theatrical production before movie rights were sold they discussed a pre-Broadway tour with Miss Dietrich who agreed to consider the idea." "That night, after their meeting, Vera Caspary, quote:" ""Remembered too vividly the time I had been incurably maimed by a pre-Broadway tryout." "With dire thoughts of all the potential disagreements with producer, director and star I decided to offer Laura as a movie and be done with her," end of quote." "According to Caspary, only two studios showed even faint interest." "MGM, with plans for a B mystery, and 20th Century Fox." "Otto Preminger had recently signed a contract with Fox as a director/actor." "He had performed as an actor in the 1942 Pied Piper and the 1943 Margin for Error in addition to directing the latter." "And he was looking for another property to direct." "He remembered Laura from New York and convinced the studio to buy the book in June 1943 for $30,000:.." "...allowing the writers, Caspary and Sklar to retain the dramatic play rights." "Look at her." "Earlier in his career, in the mid-1930s Preminger had been under contract to Fox as a director." "After testing him with two relatively modest pictures Darryl Zanuck assigned Preminger to an important and big-budgeted costume drama the 1938 Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped." "However, Zanuck and Preminger had a major falling out during filming and Preminger was replaced on the picture by Alfred Werker." "He couldn't get any work in Hollywood for the next few years so he went to New York and started to produce and direct plays." "Shortly after Pearl Harbor, while Preminger was still in New York Zanuck was away from the studio on duty as a colonel in the Signal Corps for which he was filming documentary and training films." "When he returned to Fox in June of 1943:.." "...William Goetz, who had been Zanuck's executive assistant and in charge of the studio during his absence, left Fox." "Goetz had been responsible for the rehiring of Preminger originally as an actor only." "Eventually, Preminger met with Zanuck." "They had not spoken since the Kidnapped episode five years earlier." "Now, according to Preminger Zanuck told him to continue working on three properties:" "Laura, In the Meantime, Darling and Ambassador Dodd's Diary." "The last, not filmed." ""You can produce them, but you will never direct again as long as I am here at Fox," Preminger quotes Zanuck as saying." "Zanuck put Preminger under Bryan Foy an executive in charge of relatively low-budget films." "However, and this is a big however In the Meantime, Darling, which came out in 1944:.." "...went before the cameras under Preminger's direction in the middle of December '43, some time after Zanuck's return and months before Laura began filming." "Waldo, for your own good, I'm warning you to stop implying that I had anything to do with Laura's death." "Very well, I'll stop implying." "I'll make a direct statement." "All right, you asked for it." "I wouldn't." "Jay Dratler, a well-educated and cultured writer from the East Coast who had done postgraduate work at the Sorbonne before writing some novels was selected to do the adaptation and screenplay of Laura because of his sophisticated and urbane background." "He had been in Hollywood only about three years working as a freelance writer on a few undistinguished B films and routine program pictures such as La Conga Nights Meet Boston Blackie, Fly-By-Night, et cetera." "Vera Caspary says that she was asked to work on the screenplay." "Quote, "But I was sick and weary of an old passion." "I'd worked too hard on the abandoned first play, the novel the second play that had been re- and rewritten and I'd heard the various ideas of the directors who had hoped to do the play." "'Let Laura stay dead in the first act, ' I said." "'I am through with her,"' end of quote." "Excuse me." "Photographs were shot in the Algonquin Hotel in New York of the table at which Alexander Woollcott had habitually dined as well as the headwaiter who served him." "These photographs were used to build a replica of the hotel's dining room on the studio lot for the scene in which Laura first encounters Waldo." "And this will only take a minute." "Really." " This is..." " Young woman." "Either you have been raised in some incredibly rustic community where good manners are unknown or you suffer from the common feminine delusion that the fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct." "Now, back to the screenplay of Laura." "By October the 30th, 1943, Jay Dratler had finished his first draft." "He stayed very close to the novel with regard to plot, characters and structure even to the device of having Waldo narrate the first portion of the novel followed by Mark, and then in the last third, Laura." "The ending also followed the book." "Waldo, the cynical columnist, returns to Laura's apartment and repeats his attempt to kill her using a walking stick that conceals a gun that fires BB shot." "According to Preminger, Foy did not care for the script." "Preminger persuaded him to let Zanuck read it." "On November the 1st, Zanuck sent five typewritten pages of notes on the first draft to Foy and Preminger." "Some of his points were as follows, quote:" ""Waldo is the only well-drawn character throughout and even his lines could be punched up with more sarcastic humor and ironic, sadistic wisecracks." "He should speak lines like The Man Who Comes to Dinner." "Laura is a mess." "She is neither interesting nor attractive." "And I doubt if any first-rate actress would ever play her." "As it is now, she seems terribly naive, a complete sucker." "It is bad enough for her to fall in love with a glorified pimp like Shelby Carpenter but when she tries to protect him later on I feel that she is either a very stupid person or just a puppet." "By curing Shelby, we will help Laura's character." "By curing, I mean by making him a more attractive personality." "For instance, like actor Reginald Gardiner." "Unless he is charming and debonair and a very cultured pimp then we will never have any respect for Laura." "But you still have to work on Laura." "I can understand Mark, the detective, falling for her even falling for her picture." "But it is difficult for me to accept her falling for Mark." "Their relationship is so brief." "She's in a hell of a jam." "It seems to me that her mind would go to anything but romance." "Mark is generally well-drawn, but I think needs work." "He shows flashes of a distinct characterization such as you might find in The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man." "But these are only brief flashes." "There ought to be more of Cagney about him." "He should also have humor." "But his humor is entirely different from Waldo's." "His is the humor of the police desk, the morgue the humor of a guy who is used to dealing with tough people." "Then when he comes up against this gorgeous creature, Laura we see that it's something new to him." "All of the people, Mark included should seem as if they stepped out of The Maltese Falcon." "Everyone a distinct, different personality." "This is what made The Maltese Falcon." "It wasn't the plot." "It was the amazing characters." "The only chance this picture has of becoming a bigtime success is if these characters emerge as real, outstanding personalities." "Otherwise, it will become nothing more than a blown-up whodunit." "When Mark examines Laura's apartment I would like to see him look at her lingerie, among other things." "He looks at her shoes, her clothes, and he keeps looking back at the picture." "He tries to reconstruct her." "She begins to get under his skin." "The only place that I did not like the voice narration at all was when Laura starts to tell her own story." "It was good with the other people because you had to explain what they were thinking about, but for Laura you don't need it because the story becomes straight action," end of quote." "Well, it's evident that at this stage Zanuck was no longer thinking in terms of a low-budget picture." "His references in the notes to "first-rate actress" "bigtime success," "blown-up whodunit" and his overall interest in the property indicate that this was now to be an A picture in Zanuck's domain." "An examination of the first draft of the script indicates that Zanuck's points were well-taken for the most part." "Ex-newspaper reporter Ring Lardner Jr who had recently collaborated on the script for the Spencer Tracy" " Katharine Hepburn film Woman of the Year was then assigned to rewrite Dratler's version." "He had been working with Preminger at Fox on a screenplay that dealt with the rise of Nazism, Ambassador Dodd's Diary." "When that project was scuttled, he moved over to Laura and completed his revised screenplay three weeks later." "Lardner retained Dratler's structure but modified the dialogue in many instances in an attempt to reflect the changes requested by Zanuck." "Laura was built up." "Shelby acquired more charm and even sang and played the piano at a party." "However, Laura's narration remained during the final portion of the film." "Lardner did two more drafts either with Dratler or using Dratler's material, making only minor changes." "Meanwhile, Preminger needed a director since, according to Preminger, Zanuck would not let him direct." "Preminger and Dana Andrews recalled that Lewis Milestone was offered Laura but turned it down." "Vera Caspary remembers John Brahm telling her that he rejected it." "Preminger said that Walter Lang associated primarily with musicals at Fox, also declined." "Rouben Mamoulian accepted." "He recently had directed the original production of Oklahoma!" "on Broadway." "After reading the novel and the Dratler-Lardner script Mamoulian suggested that Samuel Hoffenstein who had worked on Mamoulian's film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Love Me Tonight, both in 1932:.." "...and The Song of Songs in 1933:.." "...be put on a rewrite with Hoffenstein's current collaborator, Betty Reinhardt." "Reinhardt, among other things had written some pictures in the Maisie series at MGM." "...knowing Jacoby was unworthy of her." "It was a masterpiece, because it was a labor of love." "Naturally, she could never regard him seriously again." "There were others, of course." "But her own discrimination ruled them out before it became necessary for me to intercede." "Until one night at a party at Ann Treadwell's." "It was one of her usual roundups of bizarre and nondescript characters corralled from every stratum of society." "This is Mr. and Mrs. Preston." "They've been waiting to meet you." "How do you do?" "While the final draft of the script was being written, casting proceeded." "An August the 3rd, 1943 Los Angeles Times news item reported that Eva Gabor would portray Laura Hunt and that George Sanders, John Sutton and Monty Woolley were under consideration for the part of Waldo." "An October the 28th, 1943 Hollywood Reporter news item stated that the studio was negotiating with George Raft for the role." "Obviously, that didn't progress very far." "Then Jennifer Jones was cast in the title role under an agreement with David O. Selznick that called for her to make one picture a year at 20th Century Fox." "She had been made a star on loan out by Selznick to Fox for the leading role in The Song of Bernadette." "However, Jones failed to report for work on the 24th of April, 1944:" "20th Century Fox threatened legal action." "Then the Selznick studio said that they didn't get a script and that it wasn't submitted for approval." "20th Century Fox filed suit against Jones." "Later the suit was settled anyway." "Jones went on to make several films for 20th Century Fox." " I do." " She has good sense." "Wait just a minute." "Thanks, Louise." "Then Gene Tierney, a Fox contract star, was agreed upon instead." "Tierney liked the script but after one reading was unenthusiastic about her role." "The time on camera was less than she would like, she noted." "And, quote, "Who wants to play a painting?" "The treatment of the story seemed unorthodox." "In truth, only Otto Preminger had absolute faith in the project" end of quote." "Tierney had heard that Jennifer Jones had turned down the part." "And she admits that it wasn't so much the part she minded as the idea of being second choice." "Quote, "Anyway, Laura was an escape from all the half-caste girls I had played." "A Polynesian, a Eurasian, an Arab and a Chinese." "Strangely enough I had played highly spirited roles in New York on the stage." "Then in Hollywood, I used to look in the mirror and wondered how this Brooklyn girl ever could have got transplanted so far," end of quote." "Well, the Polynesian referred to was for Son of Fury in 1942:" "The Eurasian was in the 1942 The Shanghai Gesture." "The Arab was for Sundown in 1941:.." "...and the Chinese was for China Girl in 1943:" "Gene Tierney was born in Brooklyn, New York." "She was educated in private schools in Connecticut and Switzerland and played supporting parts in several plays in New York including The Male Animal in 1940:" "This play was seen by Darryl F. Zanuck who signed her to a 20th Century Fox contract." "Laura was her first major role although she had done many prior to that." "And then Leave Her to Heaven for which she received an Oscar nomination was the biggest hit that Fox had ever had up until that time." "This was in 1945." "Some of her other pictures include Dragonwyck, The Razor's Edge The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, On the Riviera and so forth and so on." "In Gene Tierney's autobiography she speaks candidly about her role as Laura." "Quote, "I never felt my own performance was much more than adequate." "I'm pleased that audiences still identify me with Laura as opposed to not being identified at all." "But their tributes, I believe, are for the character the dreamlike Laura, rather than any gifts that I brought to the role."" "Yes, Laura, I heard everything he said." "Rouben Mamoulian apparently recommended Judith Anderson for the role of Laura's aunt." "Waldo presented special problems." "Monty Woolley, under contract to Fox was mentioned by Zanuck as early as November 1943:" "He was a logical choice having played the role of Sheridan Whiteside a takeoff on Alexander Woollcott in the original Broadway company of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 1939:.." "...and in the Warner Bros. film of 1941:" "Laird Cregar, under contract to Fox had been considered for the role of Waldo but Preminger did not want Cregar." "Quote, "I felt that the only possibility to make this a success was if people did not know from the beginning that this amusing and very urbane and civil character was the villain." "You must have a man who either is unknown or who has never played heavies before." "A friend, Felix Fifay, who knew everyone knew Clifton Webb, who at that time was playing in Noel Coward's play Blithe Spirit downtown in Los Angeles" end of quote." "Preminger attended a performance and was fascinated by Clifton Webb to whom he immediately gave a copy of the script." "Quote, "He loved it, and he wanted to play the role." "When I went to Zanuck and suggested him the reaction was completely negative," end of quote." "Casting director Rufus Le Maire was present at this interview and felt immediately that Zanuck would not like Clifton Webb." "According to Preminger, quote:" ""Le Maire said, 'You can't have Clifton Webb for this part." "He flies.'" "I said, 'What do you mean?" "'" "I didn't even understand what he meant." "I already knew that Clifton Webb was a little effeminate but that didn't bother me at all." "I said, 'I would like to make a test with him,"' end of quote." "Finally, Zanuck agreed to a test, but Webb refused." "According to Preminger, Webb told him that if Zanuck wanted to see him he could come to the theater and observe him in Blithe Spirit." "Quote, "I don't know your Miss Tierney and I don't want to make a test with her," end of quote." "Then he agreed to test with a monologue from Blithe Spirit." "Zanuck was adamant about having Webb do a scene from Laura." "Besides, he wanted to see how the script would play." "Preminger felt that Zanuck's belief in the script had been shaken because so many directors had turned it down." "Undaunted, Preminger shot the test a monologue from Blithe Spirit, without Zanuck's permission." "Preminger recalled Rouben Mamoulian at the time being out of town or somewhere." "Mamoulian declined to comment." ""When it was finished," said Preminger, "I took it to Zanuck's projection room absolutely ready to be fired and ran it for him." "It was beautifully photographed, and Clifton played it very well." "He knew what Zanuck's objection might be and he avoided that completely referring to the previously mentioned flying." "Zanuck looked at me and, being a professional, he liked it." "He said, 'You son of a bitch, I told you I don't want to see the play but, okay, he can have the part,"' end of quote." "Waldo in the novel is described as being 52 years old 6-foot-3, heavy with soft flesh sporting a graying Vandyke beard and a black Homburg." "In Jay Dratler's first draft of the screenplay he is referred to as, quote:" ""A middle-aged, bearded raconteur, dramatic critic man about several towns and oft misquoted wit," end of quote." "Clifton Webb, in his early 50s, was tall, lean, beardless and elegant with a rather haughty manner." "He had been a dancer and then a Broadway musical-comedy star in the late 1920s and early 1930s going on to star in such non-musical plays as Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and the first national touring company of The Man Who Came to Dinner as Whiteside/Woollcott." "Although Laura was announced as his film debut actually he had played supporting roles in a few silent films such as Polly With a Past in 1920 with Ina Claire New Toys in 1925 with Richard Barthelmess and Heart of a Siren in 1925 with Barbara La Marr." "In 1935, MGM signed him to a contract after the tremendous success of the 1933 Broadway review As Thousands Cheer, in which he starred." "Webb was to be MGM's answer to RKO's Fred Astaire." "His first film, Elegance, was to be based on the story of Maurice the famous ballroom dancer." "Joan Crawford was to play Walton, his partner." "But the film was not made, and after 18 months of inactivity the MGM contract was cancelled, and Webb went back to the theater." "Art director Leland Fuller who was up for an Academy Award for Laura actually joined the film industry in 1930:.." "...but he didn't become an assistant art director until Song of the Islands in 1940:" "Then his first full art-director credit was on Heaven Can Wait, the Ernst Lubitsch film." "After Laura, of course, he went on to do many big films such as The Dolly Sisters, Kiss of Death, Sitting Pretty Cheaper by the Dozen, On the Riviera, Viva Zapata!" "... ...How to Marry a Millionaire, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!" "and so on." "Apparently, Zanuck had John Hodiak in mind for the role of the detective." "Dana Andrews told me that one night when he and Lewis Milestone were driving home from location on the 1944 The Purple Heart Milestone handed Andrews the script of Laura which Preminger had asked Milestone to direct." "Milestone had turned the picture down but he told Andrews that the part of the detective would make Andrews a star." "Andrews read the script and set out to get the role." "He met Preminger at a party at Milestone's house." "Preminger told him he thought that John Hodiak was set for the part and that Zanuck thought Hodiak had considerable sex appeal in Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 Lifeboat." "Later, Andrews was able to get columnist Hedda Hopper to put a hint in her column about, quote, "Andrews for Laura," end of quote." "Then one day on the backlot while shooting the 1944 Wing and a Prayer Andrews recalled to me:" ""Virginia Zanuck, Darryl's wife, and I had a long discussion about various things while her young son Richard and a friend were playing around the Navy planes." "Finally, she said, 'You know, Dana I never thought of you as a leading man but as a character type." "But I've seen a different side of your personality today,"' end of quote." "Since he was usually cast as the man who loses the girl Andrews told her, he would naturally play that role differently from the way he would play the leading man." ""She looked at me and said, 'You really believe that?" "'" "And I said, 'Of course.' Well, that was on a Saturday." "On Monday morning, Preminger called me up and said, 'Dana, I don't know what happened but Zanuck says that you have the part in Laura,"' end of quote." "Because she was a real fine lady." "Dana Andrews was born in Mississippi." "He worked at a gas station for several years while attending the Pasadena Playhouse and making the rounds of stage companies and film studios." "He was finally signed by Samuel Goldwyn and began secondary roles at Goldwyn and then Fox started to share his contract in 1940:" "One of his major roles before he became a big star was in The Ox-Bow Incident." "Then after Laura, he was a major star." "Many good films followed:" "A Walk in the Sun The Best Years of Our Lives, Boomerang!" "He also appeared in many television productions from 1969 to 1972:.." "...and a cult film called Night of the Demon." "He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1963 to 1965:" "Reginald Gardiner, a friend of Zanuck's was thought of originally for Shelby, then Vincent Price was considered then Gardiner again." "And finally Price was cast." "Vincent Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri and he was a very cultivated character star of the American stage, films, radio and television." "He was under contract for a while at Universal after being in the theater and started out playing The Invisible Man Returns in which he was invisible for a large portion of the time." "He was also in the wonderful Tower of London with Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff and he was under contract at Fox for several years." "He played in Brigham Young" " Frontiersman in 1940 as the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith." "He did The Song of Bernadette." "He did Leave Her to Heaven, that amazingly popular Fox film of 1945:" "Then he did the House of Wax in 1953:" "This 3-D horror-film remake of The Mystery of the Wax Museum which was extraordinarily successful." "And from then on he starred in many, many horror films such as The Fly." "And then he started with Roger Corman doing that series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death and so forth and so on." "In 1980, he was selected to host the PBS anthology series Mystery!" "... ...and did that for nine years." "You mean Lancaster Corey, the art dealer?" "Yes." "He was a friend of Laura's." "Let him dispose of everything." "It'll be less gruesome that way." "Not quite everything, Ann." "Cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, after doing Laura and winning the Academy Award for Best Cinematography went on to do big things at Fox." "After all, he had started out as an assistant to cinematographer Charles Clarke and Arthur Miller then became an operator." "So his big chance was Laura." "Some of the other pictures he did following Laura:" "Hangover Square, Cluny Brown, Road House, My Cousin Rachel the River of No Return, once again with Preminger and Marilyn Monroe The Long, Hot Summer, Marty, Billy Wilder's The Apartment." "And he was one of the cinematographers on How the West Was Won." "His style, as evidenced in Laura, was beautifully realized when Preminger talked about the flowing movement and moving the camera in for a close-up or out from a close-up rather than straight cuts." "And if you look at the film from that standpoint you'll find that it works extremely well." "Composer David Raksin came to Hollywood in the mid-'30s to work with Charlie Chaplin on the musical score for his Modern Times." "He stayed in Hollywood working for 20th Century Fox and after Laura he became a composer of the first rank doing scores for such memorable films as the big 20th Century Fox picture Forever Amber in 1947:" "He also worked on such films through the years as Force of Evil in 1948:.." "...the MGM Pat And Mike with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and The Bad and the Beautiful a marvelous Hollywood-on-Hollywood film, in 1952:" "And he did a Cinerama production in 1956, Seven Wonders of the World." "In 1957, he worked on the famous and popular Wagon Train series." "1958, Separate Tables." "And also a wonderful film called Will Penny that he did in 1968:" "Raksin recalled, quote, "The word was around the studio that it was a hard-luck picture from which all sensible people shy away for fear of being tainted." "Preminger wanted the top composer at Fox Alfred Newman, but Al, who was chief of the music department had more films currently in work than he could handle." "And he had heard the rumors, so he declined the honor," end of quote." "Next it was offered to Bernard Herrmann, who promptly turned it down." "Raksin, on staff, was then assigned." "Quote, "I liked the picture at once but was disheartened at a screening to hear Zanuck immediately zero in on an essential scene in which the detective wanders around Laura's apartment at night." "I gathered that the sequence had already been severely shortened and now it was about to be reduced still further." "I was heard to interject, 'But if you cut that scene nobody will understand that the detective is in love with Laura." "This is one of those scenes, ' said I, 'in which music could tip the balance tell the audience how the man feels." "And if it doesn't work, you can still trim the sequence.'" "'Permission granted to try,"' end of quote." "In the novel, Waldo explains that, quote:" ""Old tunes had been as much a part of Laura as her laughter." "A hearty and unashamed lowbrow, she had listened to Brahms but had heard Kern," end of quote." "Jerome Kern's Roberta, in the fall of 1933:.." "...was Laura's first attendance at an opening night with Waldo." ""Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," from that score is mentioned specifically in Vera Caspary's book." "In all of the drafts of the script, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is referred to as, quote, "one of her favorites," end of quotes." "It emanates from her phonograph is heard being played by three musicians at the restaurant where Waldo and Mark dine and is indicated to be used as underscoring throughout the montage depicting Laura's rise in the business world." "It is not clear whether an attempt was made to acquire the rights for the use of the song or not." "But Raksin and Preminger referred to the latter's desire to use George Gershwin's "Summertime" as the key theme." "But it was not available for use in this context." "Raksin told me that Alfred Newman at one time was thinking of using his extremely popular and enduring theme from the 1931 Street Scene but was talked out of it by his orchestrator, Edward Powell." "Raksin met with Preminger in Newman's office." "He was not aware at the time that Preminger had tried to get "Summertime" for use in the picture." "Now Preminger told Raksin that he intended to use Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" as the theme." "Raksin replied that, much as he admired the tune and its urbane composer, he thought it wrong for this film because of the accretion of ideas and associations that a song already so well-known would evoke in the audience." "Raksin also suggested that Preminger probably favored the piece as much for the coincidence of its title with his own conception of Laura as for its music." "It was agreed that if over the weekend Raksin could come up with a melody that Preminger liked, it would be used." "Otherwise, "Sophisticated Lady" definitely would be purchased and interpolated." "Raksin said, quote:" ""All weekend I struggled with the idea." "I was tied up in knots." "In trouble emotionally and out of touch with myself." "On Saturday I had received a letter from a lady with whom I was in love and to whom I was married." "All I could make of it was that it said something I didn't wanna hear so I put it in my pocket and hoped it would go away." "By Sunday night, I knew that my big chance was fading fast." "I didn't really believe in any of the themes I had written and I was beginning to think that a wiser man would have known it was time to end the pain and give up." "From the time I was a boy, when the music wouldn't flow I would prop a book or a poem on the piano and improvise." "The idea was to divert my mind from conscious awareness of music making." "I hadn't done that for a long time and certainly didn't intend to try to outwit my sorrowing mind but I took the letter out of my pocket put it up on the piano and began to play." "Suddenly, the meaning of the words on the page became clear to me." "She was saying, 'Hail, farewell, better luck next life and get lost.'" "Knowing that, I felt the last of my strength go." "And then without willing it I was playing the first phrase of what you know as 'Laura.'" "I feel certain that the reason people responded as they do to that melody in the picture and on its own, is that it's about love." "Specifically about that yearning particular to unrequited love," end of quote." "You're alive." "After the so-called hard-luck film was released to popular and critical acclaim the studio received an usual amount of mail asking about the music and noting its lack of availability on sheet music and records." "The interest was so great that Johnny Mercer was engaged to write a lyric, and "Laura" was published and recorded as a popular song." "It soon became number one on the hit parade and a phenomenal record seller." "The song, of course, has become a classic and has been performed by diverse artists in concert pop, jazz over the decades." "Another film composer, Elmer Bernstein sums up the relationship of the picture to the music." "Quote, "The film portrayed a man falling in love with a ghost." "The mystique was supplied by the insistence of the haunting melody." "The detective could not escape it." "It was everywhere." "We may not remember what Laura was like but we never forget that she was the music," end of quote." "You're sure?" "When did it happen?" "Friday night." "What are you going to do now?" "Find out who was murdered and then find the murderer." "Art director Lyle Wheeler had been with MGM and then in 1935 he became supervising art director for David O. Selznick's Selznick International studio." "And then he worked for Alexander Korda for a while." "His films with Selznick included The Prisoner of Zenda, A Star Is Born Gone With the Wind and Rebecca." "Then in 1944, he was appointed supervising art director at 20th Century Fox, and in 1947 head of the art department." "He won four Oscars, including one for Gone With the Wind Anna and the King of Siam, The Robe and The Diary of Anne Frank." "Of all his films, he would tell friends, he was proudest of his work in Anna and the King of Siam which won him his second Academy Award." "Then what?" "Then I got off the train at Norwalk." "The writing team of Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt..." "...and rehearsals under Mamoulian's direction began immediately." "Mamoulian was a strong advocate of rehearsing for a week or two before the start of shooting and had done so on most if not all of his previous productions." "I had everything I needed in the house." "Nobody came to see you?" "On May 15th, after Mamoulian had shot for 18 days events become confusing." "Preminger took over as director as well as producer and Mamoulian left Fox." "You were going to marry Shelby Carpenter this week." "Thursday, if I'm not mistaken." "One version of the circumstances leading to Mamoulian's exit is that Preminger had been undermining Mamoulian hoping all along to take over as director." "According to this story, Mamoulian finally went to Zanuck and eventually resigned." "How else did the girl get in here?" "Preminger's version is that Mamoulian's footage was not good and Zanuck was unhappy." "Quote, "Everything was blamed on me," said Preminger." ""Mamoulian was to start the picture again but without any interference from me." "In the meantime, Mamoulian, who didn't talk to me who didn't permit me on the set, had also gone to Zanuck." "Well, he started again, and it was worse than before." "Zanuck took him off the picture, went back to his office called me and said, 'You can start directing on Monday"' end of quote." "I suspect nobody and everybody." "I'm merely trying to get at the truth." "But Dana Andrews recalled to me another version." "At the party mentioned earlier when he first talked with Preminger about playing in Laura Andrews remembered Preminger discussing Preminger's concept of the detective as being, quote:" ""A highly educated criminologist, rather than just a tough cop" end of quote." "According to Andrews, Mamoulian apparently was going along with this approach when rehearsals and shooting began." "Andrews said, "So I was thinking about an intellectual type." "Then after two weeks or so of filming, Zanuck returned from New York." "I was told to report to his office." "When I arrived, Rouben and Otto were seated on either side of Zanuck." "Zanuck said to me, 'I saw the rushes." "I don't think the detective should be the kind of character you're trying to play." "We'll have to change that." "This guy has got to be a regular cop." "We have this beautiful girl, high society and all that." "We need the contrast,"' end of quote." "Andrews remembers Preminger saying:" ""I told Rouben that this was wrong," and Mamoulian, incensed, retorting:" ""I told you!" "You talked me into it," end of quote." "Then Andrews left the room." ""That was Saturday," said Andrews." ""On Monday, we had a new director." "Preminger took over," end of quote." "When I discussed all this with Mamoulian he requested that he not be quoted in any way with regard to Laura obviously regarding the entire experience as extremely unpleasant and, in his view, unworthy of comment." "Dames are always pulling a switch on you." "Stand by." "Well, at first there was considerable tension when Preminger began directing." "Dana Andrews even called Samuel Goldwyn who shared Andrews' contract with Fox to see if Goldwyn can get him off the picture." "Well, that didn't work." "Andrews told me that Judith Anderson and Otto did not get along at all." "As Anderson recalled, quote, "We were all on edge and very tense." "Preminger's direction was Germanic in approach." "He saw the picture his way." "There was a change of everything and conflicts about everything." "I much preferred Mamoulian's direction." "It would have been a happier experience if he had been directing" end of quote." "The original portrait of Laura made for the film had been painted by Mamoulian's wife, a popular Hollywood artist." "But when Preminger took over he had a photographic portrait of Gene Tierney shot by Fox still photographer Frank Polony." "It was enlarged and then painted over by the Fox special effects department to make it appear to be an original painting." "Are you taking it down or putting it away?" "Bonnie Cashin was assigned as wardrobe designer." "At that time, she was relatively low in the Fox echelon." "She was on Preminger's low-budget In the Meantime, Darling, for example." "But subsequently, she became a famous designer of women's fashions." "At least one outfit worn by Judith Anderson was changed in the retake of her first scene in the film." "Now, with regard to Gene Tierney's wardrobe it is difficult to say if any changes were made." "It is not clear how many or indeed if any scenes with her were photographed before Mamoulian left the film." "I've spent little time in observing my own character." "You haven't borrowed it lately?" "You didn't just bring it back?" "You followed me here, you saw me come in." "You ought to know." "You realize the spot you're in, Carpenter?" "You took that poor girl to Miss Hunt's apartment." "You knew all along it was she who was murdered." "Didn't you know Laura Hunt would come back any day and spill the whole thing?" "Or did you plan to kill her too hide the body someplace and cover up your first crime?" "You're being fantastic, McPherson." "You took a bottle of Black Pony to her house Friday night." "I took it there over a week ago." "Bessie says it wasn't there Friday night." "It was Saturday morning." "I can't help what Bessie said." " Where is the key to her apartment?" " I haven't got it." "What did you do with it?" "Give it back to her tonight?" "I never had one." "You didn't take the scotch to her house Friday and you haven't got a key to her apartment." "How'd you get in?" "You had a key and I know it." "Come on, spill it!" "Laura received an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in Black-and-White and was nominated in the following categories:" "Best Direction, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Clifton Webb and Best Art Direction in Black-and-White." "Cameraman Lucien Ballard was replaced by Joseph LaShelle after Mamoulian left." "LaShelle told me, "Ballard had been close with Mamoulian but Otto was responsible for putting me on the picture" end of quote." "LaShelle had been a director of photography for only a short time before Laura having been promoted from camera operator." "LaShelle had photographed Clifton Webb's test for Preminger." "According to LaShelle Preminger discussed the photographic style with him and requested a continuous camera flow from one room to another from medium shot to close-up, rather than a cut whenever it served a purpose." "According to Gene Tierney LaShelle was determined to make a success of his big opportunity." "Quote, "He would take ages to light a scene." "Every time I heard him say, 'No, no, it's not right' I could feel my teeth clench, and I knew there went another hour or two of waiting for the lights to be reset" end of quote." "She was on the set before the sun came up and not home until 8 or 9 in the evening." "Once, Oleg Cassini, Tierney's dress-designer husband furious over the eternal delays, walked onto the set and took her by the arm." ""Come on," he roared." ""It's not worth it." "Nothing is worth it." "We're going home."" "And they did." "Tierney said that Oleg knew better." "The effort was worthwhile." ""Preminger drove himself and us so hard." "He was simply tireless." "When the rest of the cast seemed ready to drop from exhaustion Otto would still muster as much vigor as when the day began," end of quote." "The question of retakes and Mamoulian's material is uncertain." "Andrews didn't recall how much specifically of Mamoulian's footage was reshot." "Joseph LaShelle told me that although only the bare minimum were requested by Zanuck presumably those scenes involving Dana Andrews' interpretation and other problem areas in actuality, Preminger gradually kept sneaking in additional scenes to be retaken during the shooting schedule until almost everything was redone." ""We're not going to leave any scene at all of Mamoulian's in this picture" Preminger confided to LaShelle during the course of filming as LaShelle remembered it." "She phoned you after she promised not to call anybody." "Why?" "It's perfectly natural she'd want to see me..." "Dana Andrews recalled recording voice-over narration to be used in the second part of the story but it was decided to drop all narration except for Waldo's in the first part of the film." "There was even narration by Mark intended for the famous scene in which he returns to Laura's apartment goes through her things and stares at her portrait." "During this time the audience realizes he has fallen in love with a woman who is presumed to be dead." "Also lost along the way was a scene at Ebbets Field where Mark questioned Shelby while watching a ball game." "This scene was to follow Mark's initial encounter with Shelby in Laura's aunt's apartment." "And it had appeared in each version of the script." "One scene included in all previous versions of the script and originating in the novel but excluded from the latest Hoffenstein-Reinhardt revision took place at Laura's presumed funeral." "This, of course, was before it was discovered that Laura was not the woman who was killed." "In this version, curiosity seekers crashed into the funeral parlor while the eulogy was being delivered." "...to my dreams of a career and then taught me another recipe." "Don't move." "There, Bessie." "That's all right, Bessie." "She's alive." "It's all been a mistake, Bessie." "I'm not a ghost." "Really." "I found you and you were dead." "It was Miss Redfern's body you found." "How about taking over here?" "Fixing us some coffee and eggs?" "Dorothy Adams played Bessie, Laura's maid." "She was in many, many pictures over the years starting in the '30s and going up until the '60s and '70s." "She met her future husband, actor-director Byron Foulger as a member of the touring Olsen Players." "Then the couple later joined the Pasadena Playhouse." "Over the years, she did many popular pictures such as Since You Went Away, The Best Years of Our Lives Sitting Pretty, The Greatest Show on Earth The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Big Country and so forth." "She also did notable television guest appearances in such shows as Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Wagon Train Gunsmoke and You Are There." " May I have a match, please?" " Oh, I'm sorry." "I also told you that he wasn't in love with her." "Just sit still." "The play Laura was not presented in New York until June 1947:" "Otto Kruger played Waldo, K.T. Stevens was Laura and Hugh Marlowe played Mark." "Laura was broadcast on Lux Radio Theater on February 5th, 1945, with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Vincent Price reprising their screen roles and Otto Kruger replacing Webb." "And then again on February 1st, 1954, with Tierney, Victor Mature Joe Kearns and Carleton Young." "Laura was adapted twice for television." "On October 19th, 1955, it was on CBS Television starring Dana Wynter, George Sanders and Robert Stack." "The one-hour telecast was later released in England as a feature film." "On January 24th, 1968, Laura was an ABC color special." "The program featured a new adaptation by Truman Capote and starred George Sanders, Robert Stack and Lee Bouvier." "Right-hand pocket." "Do you want a doctor?" "20th Century Fox was formed in 1935:.." "...as the result of a merger between the veteran Fox company and the relatively new 20th Century Pictures." "When production chief Darryl F. Zanuck had left Warner Bros. in 1933:.." "...he and Joseph M. Schenck formed a very successful independent company, 20th Century." "Two years later, Zanuck was named vice president in charge of production at the merged 20th Century Fox." "Zanuck didn't have a sufficient number of stars at first but he soon developed a strong roster that included Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Loretta Young Sonja Henie, Henry Fonda, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda Maureen O'Hara, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney, among others." "Later stars include Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Dana Andrews Richard Widmark, Clifton Webb, Rex Harrison, Jean Simmons Richard Burton and certainly last but not least, Marilyn Monroe." "Except for a relatively brief time during World War II Zanuck was in complete charge of the 20th Century Fox studio and the product." "That is, up until 1956, when he left to become an independent producer." "In those days, there were no committees to decide what to produce no frequent top-executive musical chairs." "Zanuck ran the show." "Now, naturally he had to answer to the president of the company and the board of directors most of whom then were in New York." "But generally they left the business of making the movies up to him." "The vast majority of the people on the lot including the actors, the writers, directors, art directors, cameramen they were all under contract and/or were full-time employees." "Zanuck, having been a writer was a strong believer in story conferences following the completion of each draft of an outline a treatment and a screenplay." "In addition to reading drafts of the scripts and making his own notations in pencil directly on the pages prior to the conferences Zanuck was responsible for casting decisions, key roles and producer, writer and director assignments." "He also looked at dailies once or twice a day and would make comments to the producer and/or director if he felt they were warranted." "One thing he decidedly did not do, with rare exception was to visit the set the backlot, which of course is now Century City or location while a picture was shooting." "He was a firm believer at the time in the director functioning as a director when the film was in production without having any second-guessing by the production executive pacing on the sidelines." "However, after the feature was cut Zanuck concentrated on editorial changes." "The screenings and modifications of the edited work print usually took place at night in the projection room at the studio." "Zanuck, of course, attended previews and presided over post-preview discussions with his associates." "I was afraid you wouldn't think of hiding that shotgun." " What shotgun?" " The one I gave you." "You don't have to lie to me, darling." "I'll stand by you." "What's the matter, Laura?" "Judith Anderson was born in Australia and she gradually rose in stature to become one of the leading actresses on the stage." "Memorable performances as Gertrude to John Gielgud's Hamlet in 1936:.." "...as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth in 1937 and 1941:.." "...and the title role in Medea in 1947 and 1949:" "In 1960, she was named dame commander of the British Empire." "Dame Judith made her first film appearance in 1933 in Blood Money." "Her most famous role is probably as Mrs. Danvers in the Selznick/Hitchcock Rebecca of 1940:" "Some of her other film roles, And Then There Were None The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Pursued, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Man Called Horse." "She also played in a TV series, Santa Barbara, in 1984 to 1987:" "And in Star Trek III:" "The Search for Spock in 1984 she was a high priestess." "She also did Elizabeth the Queen on television in 1968." "Did the choice of the name Laura have any particular significance?" "Well, through most of his life Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet and scholar kept writing and rearranging his poems about his beloved Laura." "The dominant theme of his collection of lyrics is hopeless love a spiritualized passion for the unattainable." "Upon Laura's death, as described in the lyrics the poet finds that his grief is as difficult to live with as was his former despair." "These poems of Petrarch dominated lyric poetry for centuries after." "And the name Laura has been used by poets ever since in love poems addressed to similar idealized ladies." "Robert Toft entitled his 1597 collection of love lyrics Laura." "Lord Byron used the name in his poem "Laura."" "And Schiller wrote a series of poems to Laura in the 18th century." "However, Vera Caspary answered when I asked her if she had been influenced by this heritage." ""There is no significance to my choice of the name Laura." "I've always liked the name." "There's no more to it than that."" "Well, that took care of that question." "Laura..." "Don't worry, darling." "Well, after his success in Laura Clifton Webb was now under contract at 20th Century Fox." "He was in a major Zanuck personally produced picture called The Razor's Edge in 1946 and The Dark Corner." "Then in 1948:.." "...he played Lynn Belvedere in a surprising hit, Sitting Pretty." "He followed that up with two other Mr. Belvedere comedies and he also did Cheaper by the Dozen in 1950:" "And he played John Philip Sousa in The Stars and Stripes Forever." "He was in the 1953 version of Titanic the very popular Three Coins in the Fountain and so forth and so on." "Did he hurt you, darling?" "Darling..." "Ann..." "Just before beginning work on his next revised script Zanuck held a story conference with Preminger, Mamoulian and Hoffenstein on March 20th, 1944." "He then dictated notes to all of them, quote:" ""Our central character is a nonentity." "On one page she's looking for a job via the fountain pen endorsement which incidentally is very good." "But on another page we find that she has a rich aunt who travels with the smart set and sleeps with gigolos." "I do not know whether Laura was a schoolgirl who wanted a career or whether she was a rich girl who was trying to break away from her aunt and society by trying to get a job," end of quote." ""The decision about which actor would play Waldo," Zanuck noted "would, of course, influence the writing." "If it was to be Laird Cregar," Zanuck said "you should look again at those scenes in the 1941 Blood and Sand" that Mamoulian had directed "in which he was so magnificent as the sardonic supercritic," end of quote." ""Shelby would have to be rewritten slightly to fit Reginald Gardiner." "While Vincent Price would have been good I'm sure Reggie will give it a splendid flavor," said Zanuck." "He continued on:" ""Starting on page 71, I want to dissolve to Mark in front of a little New York newsreel theater." "He glances at his watch." "We feel that he's killing time." "He goes into the theater and sits down in the darkness." "The newsreel is on, of course and the woman in the newsreel dissolves into Laura." "Madame Chiang Kai-shek dissolves into Laura." "A girl on a surfboard dissolves into Laura." "Every woman on the screen begins to dissolve into Laura." "And finally the scene is filled with Laura." "Mark gets up and goes out."" "This suggested sequence, incidentally was not included in the next revision or in any subsequent version." "Zanuck continued:" ""We then dissolve back to scene 141 on page 71:.." "...and we put in the business from scene 116:.." "...where Mark's voice comes over as he looks at her clothes thinks about her, and begins to realize that she has really gotten under his skin." "On page 128, when Waldo says to Laura:" "'With you, a lean, strong body is the measure of the man' I don't believe it for a moment." "This is not Laura." "She's not a woman who goes for every guy with a good physique." "She's nothing like this." "I think this remark hurts her character terribly." "I can understand a certain mothering instinct making her like the worthless Shelby." "He's charming and weak, but wonderful women frequently marry likable men even though they are weak," end of quote." "Interestingly, that line did remain in the final film." "I'd reached the point where I needed official surroundings." "Then it was worth it, Mark." "I'll call a cab for you." "Good night." "I'll see you tomorrow." "Good night, Mark." "I'm going over to Lydecker's apartment." "At the end of May, two weeks after Preminger took over as director and during the first two weeks of June Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt revised the last part of the screenplay." "Departing from the novel and previous drafts of the script it was decided at this point to have a sawed-off shotgun hidden in a secret compartment in the large antique clock in Laura's apartment." "This weapon took the place of the concealed gun in Waldo's walking stick." "Now, after realizing that Waldo is the murderer Laura takes the gun and hides it in the storage room in her apartment building." "She then goes to Waldo's apartment building to persuade him to get away before Mark arrests him." "She tells him she found the gun but not to worry it is put away in her golf bag in the attic." "Waldo promises to leave the city and Laura returns to her own apartment building." "Shortly afterward, Mark goes to Waldo's empty apartment he walks to the clock, the twin of the one in Laura's apartment which Waldo had tried to reclaim earlier." "After discovering that the hidden recess in the clock is empty Mark realizes what is about to happen and leaves immediately." "Meanwhile, Waldo, having retrieved the gun from the storage room in Laura's apartment building presses the front buzzer of her apartment." "He's on the verge of killing her when Mark intervenes." "Vera Caspary remembered meeting Preminger on the Fox lot at about this time and being asked if she would like to read the script." "She did and then went to see Preminger in his office." "Her chief complaint was and remained the use of the baroque clock in which Waldo Lydecker hides the gun." "Laura, you have one tragic weakness." "With you, a lean, strong body is the measure of a man and you always get hurt." "No man is ever going to hurt me again." "In the novel, Waldo's gun is hidden in his cane." "This was not merely a murder-story device a shock to the reader and a menace to the heroine but a Freudian symbol of Waldo's impotence and destructiveness actually the theme of the novel, according to Caspary." "She contended that Preminger argued that a gun capable of destroying a woman's face could not possibly have been contained in a walking stick." "Ballistic experts had been consulted, and besides, Preminger said:" ""No one would understand the symbolism."" "Said Caspary, "I had done research in museums and consulted a specialist in antique weapons." "A drawing had been made of the walking stick with a diagram of the concealed weapon." "I offered to show this to Mr. Preminger." "He was not interested," end of quote." "I thought you'd like to know." "We tested your shotgun." "It isn't the one." "Now, that's what I call a typical move a real key to the man's character." "First he tells you he thinks you're innocent then proceeds to check up on you." "When I report that I think she's innocent, that's my own personal opinion." "Following the completion of the filming and editing a rough cut was shown to Zanuck." "Preminger said, "He didn't like it." "The picture was over and he said:" "'Well, we missed the boat on this one, ' and left." "That night, I remember it was raining in California and my poor cutter, Lou Loeffler, and I were standing there in front of my car in the parking lot." "He couldn't understand it." "You always know when you run a film for the first time, the rough cut if there's something to it." "We felt there was," end of quote." "Zanuck maintained that the fault was with the last 15 minutes which he wanted to rewrite and retake." "Zanuck dictated his thoughts to his secretary and assigned another staff writer, Jerome Cady, to write the revisions." "Cady had graduated from B movies during the war to work on such films as The Purple Heart and Wing and a Prayer." "Toward the end of July the new scenes were being shot." "The altered approach picked up with the scene in Laura's apartment just before Waldo leaves." "In this version, Waldo does not leave the building but instead waits in the shadows towards the rear of the corridor outside the servant's entrance to Laura's apartment." "Inside, Mark opens the inner door of the twin baroque clock and discovers the gun." "He then describes to Laura how Webb shot Diane Redfern, the model thinking she was Laura." "The scene continued on as we know it from the eventually released film with the important exception of some speeches by Laura to Mark shortly after he finds the gun." "I quote, Laura referring to Waldo, "I owe him everything I am."" "Mark: "Just because he endorsed that pen five years ago for a nice fat check?"" "Laura: "He told you that story too?"" ""Well, it's true, isn't it?"" ""You see, Mark, you simply don't understand Waldo." "He dramatizes everything." "To him, I, like everything else, am only half real." "The other half exists only in his own mind." "The story he told you about the pen was one he had written for his column." "Once he writes something, he believes it." "Do you know where he actually first found me?" "In a night court." "I had been picked up for vagrancy."" ""Vagrancy?"" ""I wasn't guilty." "It was just something that happens every day, I suppose." "I came to New York looking for a career." "Highest honors in art school back home, the usual background." "But I couldn't get a start." "One night I found myself locked out of my room they picked me up on a bench in Central Park." "The judge wouldn't believe my hard-luck story, but Waldo believed me." "He was in court gathering material for his column." "He came forward and paid my fine, then he called Bullitt and Company and got me a job." "I went to work the same day." "It isn't easy to forget anything so wonderful as that," end of quote." "Well, he is." "Preminger did not like the material and said:" ""When I handed the new script to the actors, they found it ridiculous." "I told them we had to do it nevertheless."" "Dana Andrews remembered that the performers thought that this one aspect of the revised scenes laughable." "Later a screening was arranged for Zanuck of the entire film including the insertion of the new closing scenes." "The popular columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell an old friend of Zanuck's, was a guest at the evening showing along with Preminger, the editor, Loeffler, and Zanuck." "Apparently, Winchell reacted very well to the film." "According to Preminger when the picture was over, Winchell said to Zanuck:" ""Darryl, that was big time, big time." "Great, great, great." "But you're going to change the ending."" "Then Zanuck asked Preminger, according to Preminger if he wanted to have the old ending back." "Preminger said, "Sure."" ""Okay, I threw everything out, all the retakes, and put the old ending back."" "Now, very importantly, Preminger's memory is not entirely accurate." "The dialogue that I just spoke was eliminated but the rest of the modified scenes, the retakes and all of the ending remained in the film and still remains in the film." "If the doorbell rings, don't answer it." "I'll phone you in the morning." "Good night, Mark." "Get some sleep." "Forget the whole thing like a bad dream." "Laura is composed of several seemingly diverse elements which when brought together yield an intriguing aura." "The film transcends the psychological mystery, suspense and detective genres by superimposing significant portions of urbane wit and offbeat romance." "In addition, Laura has some indirect echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and the subsequent 1940 Selznick- Hitchcock film adaptation of that novel." "And in a way Laura is a forerunner of certain aspects of Hitchcock's superb 1958 Vertigo." "Both Mark McPherson, the detective in Laura and Scottie Ferguson, the detective in Vertigo are fascinated by a woman whom they believe to be dead but who turns out to be alive." "Vera Caspary's original idea of a woman thought to be dead becoming a murder suspect by walking into her own apartment was a good device in a well-plotted novel with at least a few characters of more than one-dimensional interest." "Preminger, fortunately, felt strongly that the unusual blend would work." "Vincent Price, who had known Preminger for some time and previously had acted under his direction in the 1938 Broadway stage production of Outward Bound said to me that Preminger had an implicit knowledge of the pseudo-sophisticated world." "Quote:" ""And he had an extra ability to give each one of the characters in Laura an underlying sense of evil" end of quote." "And thus, as history has proved, love is eternal." "It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout centuries." "Love is stronger than life." "It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death." "I close this evening's broadcast with some favorite lines from Dowson." ""Brief Life."" "They are not long The weeping and the laughter" "Love and desire and hate" "I think they have no portion in us After we pass the gate" " Who's tailing Lydecker?" " I was going to when he came out." " He left five minutes ago." " He didn't come out this way." "Must've gone out the back way." "Come on, let's check." "They are not long The days of wine and roses" "Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while" "Then closes within a dream" "That's the way it is, isn't it, Laura?" "You have heard the voice of Waldo Lydecker by electrical transcription." "Waldo, you've taken one life." "Isn't that enough?" "The best part of myself." "That's what you are." "Do you think I'm going to leave it to the vulgar pawing of a second-rate detective who thinks you're a dame?" "You think I could bear the thought of him holding you in his arms, kissing you, loving you?" "Laura, it's Mark." "Open the door." " There he is now." " Laura!" "He'll find us together, Laura, as we always have been always should be and always will be." "Goodbye, Laura." "The material for this commentary is based to a large degree on a chapter in my book Behind the Scenes:" "The Making of republished by Samuel French in 1989:" "This is Rudy Behlmer speaking."