Laura

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) A favorite for many film-goers for the unique reason that it's a multi-hyphenate of genres. Laura ticks off many boxes: a detective story, a murder mystery, a love story, a ghost story, a "woman's picture," and a proto-film noir.

The story of the murder of advertising executive Laura Hunt (played by Gene Tierney) is an investigation into the gossipy underbelly of New York high society, contrasting the low-down jealousies and back-biting of the rich and famous amid the glamorous fashions and elite penthouse settings, all seen through the eyes of an unimpressed gumshoe trying to see the truth behind the lace curtains.

 

The film's production history is a tempestuous one, filled with office politics at 20th Century Fox--studio head Darryl F. Zanuck had an on-going feud with producer Otto Preminger, but with Zanuck in Europe with the Army Signal Corps documenting the war effort, he had no say in Preminger's work on an adaptation of the property, which came to him when it was still the first draft of a stage-play called "Ring Twice for Laura" written by Vera Caspary. Preminger saw it as a good vehicle to make his directorial debut, and tried collaborating with the author to make it a viable project for the stage...and screen.

Ultimately, the two parted ways and Caspary turned her story into a 7-part serial for Collier's magazine with play's original title, which when re-published in book-form was shortened to, simply, "Laura" and was bought for development at 20th Century Fox.

It falls on jaded New York police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) to find out who murdered the influential ad executive Laura Hunt (Tierney), and forensics doesn't help as she was killed by a shotgun blast to the face just inside her swanky apartment. No murder weapon has been found, so he makes the rounds of Laura's acquaintances to see if he can come up with any motivation behind the killing. First, he sees Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), notorious newspaper columnist, who, after initially dismissing the ambitious Miss Hunt, became her Svengali/mentor. Lydecker used his column to promote the up-and-coming designer, but also to disparage any suitors approaching Laura on a romantic basis.

That didn't seem to dissuade Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), Laura's fianceé at the time of her death and boy-toy of her aunt (Judith Anderson). McPherson gives them all third degree burns, but is no closer to cracking the case: which of these high-toned, impeccably-dressed lizards would have, well, just the bad taste to do in Laura? Appearances may be deceiving, so he doubles down on Laura's old haunts, her apartment, going through her letters and diary, trying to read between the lines, looking to her thoughts on who might be the culprit. Instead of learning more about any suspects, he learns more about the girl, finding a woman of ambition, yes, but, a different sort than the duplicitous phony-balonies she was navigating amongst.

That's where "the twist" comes in. McPherson finds himself falling in love with the dead woman, and things only get more complicated from there, deepening the resentments that the suspects have against the lower-class detective.

Once Preminger had the script he wanted (with some venomous contributions from Ring Lardner Jr.), but his plans to direct were vetoed when Zanuck came back from Europe. Preminger was relegated to producer, and the studio head ultimately gave the director's chair to Rouben Mamoulian, who must have sensed that his producer would lose in any battle with Zanuck, and so started to re-write the script and do his own casting, using a painting by his wife for the portrait of Laura, and favoring the more sinister Laird Cregar (Hitchcock's The Lodger) as Lydecker over Preminger's choice, the slight and haughty Clifton Webb.

 

Preminger and Webb prevailed, but none of the cast was happy with Mamoulian's direction in the first days of filming, where he ignored Tierney, Andrews and Webb, and encouraged a stagey performance by Anderson. A mutiny began among the cast and Zanuck was forced to fire Mamoulian and replace him with his antagonist, Otto Preminger. Preminger kept the cast, but re-staged all of Mamoulian's work, even going so far as to toss the portrait by the director's wife.

But, there was one more ingredient that was needed to make the film an immortal classic. Zanuck assigned David Raksin to do the score and the composer met with the TCF head following a screening: "I liked the picture at once but was disheartened to hear [producer Darryl] Zanuck immediately zero in on an essential scene in which...the detective assigned to solve the ostensible murder, wanders disconsolately 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. . . . There was a horrified hush when I was heard to interject, 'But, if you cut that scene, nobody will understand that the detective is in love with Laura.' Zanuck turned toward me, then ... told me that he was about to trim the sequence again precisely because he felt that as it stood the audience would not understand it. . . . I persisted. '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.'"

Meeting with Preminger, Raksin was also disheartened to hear the director had planned to use Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" for the score, and told the director that he would have a better substitute by the next Monday morning. He was dissatisfied with his work—the legend goes—until he finally got around to reading the "Dear John" letter his wife had sent him. That was the inspiration for the "Theme from Laura", which Preminger was impressed by, Zanuck approved (the sequence wasn't trimmed any further) which became a huge hit, quite apart from the movie. It did add one element that was missing from the movie, even if it hinted at motivation—sentimentality, the melancholy sort. And it hammers home the point that love is such a strange beast that it can make one fall in love with a ghost. It is a love story, after all.

It was nominated for five Oscars (winning for Cinematography) and in 1999, it was voted into the National Film Registry. But, the ultimate test is that it still holds up today (even after being copied for at least one episode of every detective show on television) for its wit, sophistication, and downright grisliness. Good movies are not all that common. It takes a certain magic, an indefinable "something" of happenstance that makes one more than its separate elements. Given its turbulent production history and how many times it avoided mis-steps, Laura is something of a miracle.

Frank Sinatra had a hit with "Laura"

but there's something about Raksin's scoring that is...haunting.

The Man Who Never Was

The Man Who Never Was (Ronald Neame, 1956) I first read the story of the off-beat plan to distract the Nazis from British invasion plans in grade-school with a scholastic printing of Ewen Montagu's fascinating book. I knew there'd been a short-lived TV series with Robert Lansing in the 60's—more live-spy than the actual event—but this had nothing to do with that.  This one was a true story. It started a fascination with the morally ambiguous world of spies (in WWII and beyond) that still fills my trench-coat to this day.

But this story was true; the name of the corpse washed ashore was changed to protect the Allies on the invasion route to Sicily.  

On April 30, 1943, the body of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines was washed ashore on the beach of Huelva, Spain. Chained to the loop of his trench-coat was a briefcase containing personal documents (so they wouldn't be transferred through official channels) that hinted that the invasion, code-named Operation Husky, would land at Greece and Sardinia, and that  deceptive intelligence efforts would be made to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place attacking Sicily.

It was all a hoax.  There was no Major Martin (although his obituary did appear in The London Times), and the body was a plant by British intelligence forces to sway the Germans from the actual Husky invasion of Sicily, a strategic "must" for the invasion of first Italy, and then the Eastern pincer move on Germany. (Winston Churchill once remarked that "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily").  The plan, dubbed "Operation Mincemeat"—in the hope that the Germans would "swallow" it—was concocted by Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley* and Lt. Cmdr. Montagu. A corpse (that of a 34 year old Welshman Glyndwr Michael, who had no immediate family) was obtained, an elaborate back-history created, documents forged (including love letters and family correspondence), and dumped by submarine off the Spanish coast.

The Germans bought it...to the point where they still anticipated the attack two weeks after the Allies landed in Sicily. The film of the book by Montagu (played in the film by Clifton Webb) takes a few liberties—it romanticizes some of the incidents (for instance the authorship of the love letters) and creates a follow-up operation that ensures the information is transferred by a German agent (Stephen Boyd, in his film debut) without embellishment to the enemy, but it's an interesting dramatization ("It's the most outrageous, disgusting, preposterous, not to say barbaric idea I've ever heard, but work out full details and get back to me in the morning!") about one of the weirder operations in a war full of them. 

* Cholmondeley got the idea from a multi-schemed memo by one intelligence officer named Ian Fleming (who was inspired by a novel by Basil Thomsen), who in 1953 would create his own intelligence agent, James Bond.

The Double-Edged Razor

The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946) "The Razor's Edge" is a favorite book of mine, one I was inspired to read after a disappointing film adaptation, starring Bill Murray, who stood out from an otherwise respectful version like a howling sore thumb. But, it had been filmed before, in 1946, under the tutelage of producer Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Edmund Goulding, only two years after the novel's first publication.

W. Somerset Maugham's book documents (in absentia) the travels of Larry Darrell (played in 1946 by Tyrone Power), who returns from pilot duties during World War I,* deeply affected by the death and devastation he's seen, and takes a period of time to "find himself"—a lot of time. This seems odd to his high society friends, especially the family of his fiancee, Isabel (Gene Tierney), who can't seem to understand why Larry won't settle down, put his nose to the grindstone and make sure that she gets to live in the manner she's accustomed to. Larry travels to Paris, ostensibly under the supervision of Isabel's prissy Uncle Elliott (Clifton Webb) (who does NOT approve), but Larry would rather live the life of a bohemian, working menial jobs. After a year's separation, Isabel comes to visit and is appalled by Larry's simple living conditions. She breaks off the engagement after taking one last attempt to seduce Larry back to her way of thinking, then returns to Chicago, where she marries Larry's millionaire friend.

Larry continues his life in Paris, still searching for answers. Eventually, he makes a pilgrimage to India,** where, after studying and living a monk's existence in the Himalayas, he achieves a measure of happiness, finds his answers and returns to Paris to find that Isabel and her husband have lost everything in the 1929 crash, and are now living off her Uncle's charity. His old friends have all suffered various tragedies and are at a loss how to cope...and Isabel still loves him, complicating everyone's lives.

The Goulding version hews fairly close to the book, dulling the razor edges that might have ruffled the feathers of the Hays Office, and implying what could not be said in Maugham's book—Uncle Elliott's gay, Isabel is a too-willing adulteress, and their mutual friend Sophie (Anne Baxter), who suffers her own tragedies, has turned to drink and prostitution. Larry would seem to be the answer to everyone's problems, but he knows that the problem lies in living in a material world and the cheapening of human life to get ahead. And the 1946 version also includes one character that the '84 version excluded—the author (played by Herbert Marshall). Maugham wrote "The Razor's Edge" as a roman a clef, an observance as he made his way between world wars through society as a successful author, settling in Paris and the Riviera. The post-war version relies a bit too heavily on him, while the John Byrum version with Murray manages to make due without. The author becomes a sounding board in the book and first film, revealing characters' innermost thoughts—a little too forthcoming, actually (one should never get too cozy with an author)—and revealing a little too much about what they're feeling.

Power is a good Larry, but not a great one (whereas Bill Murray could have been great, if his propensity for ad-libbing goofily hadn't gotten the better of him).  It's a little too hard to distinguish just what about him changes from "troubled" to "enlightened," other than a little too much intensity in the eyes. Not the greatest of emoters, his war-weary Larry seems merely peeved and a shade brittle, but his post-pilgrimage Larry seems not so enlightened as slightly moony when reflective and somewhat superior and self-satisfied when things go his way. Gene Tierney's Isabel seems far more shallow than the actress is capable of and when she turns vindictive, its done with a raising of the eyebrows and a haughty air—it's more a pose than a performance (as opposed to Catherine Hicks who wasn't afraid to make Isabel conspiratorial. Clifton Webb has as much fun with Templeton as Denholm Elliott did (a role John Gielgud coveted), and Anne Baxter has some very good moments as Sophie, although her theatricality gets the better of her in the more demonstrative scenes (it did win her an Oscar, though), but she doesn't hold a candle to Theresa Russell's "fragility with a spine" Sophie.

One comes away with no definitive screen-version of "The Razor's Edge:" you'd like to take the supporting cast of the 80's version, find a new Larry and keep the later's travel footage as a replacement for the pristine (and wholly set-bound) ashram from the '46 version (were they trying to evoke Shangri-La from Lost Horizon?  Why does it look like a Hollywood hotel lobby designed by Frank Lloyd Wright?). The dissatisfaction is high with both, with flaws impossible to overlook, but there is a great movie in there somewhere, and each film supplies some answers to what that might be like. 

The pilgrimage continues. 

* In the Murray version, he was an ambulance driver.

** In the the latter version, he goes to Tibet.
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The Razor's Edge (John Byrum, 1984) The collaboration between Bill Murray and John Byrum on the screenplay is a case of good and bad: the screenplay's very good, respectful of Maugham, but also digging into Larry Darrell's experiences in World War I that made him a part of the "lost generation," and seek a higher truth than his social-climbing friends; the bad part is that Bill Murray stars in it.

At this point in his career, Murray was a popular comic genius, taking a rather lackluster first year on "Saturday Night Live," and parlaying it into a film career where he virtually ad-libbed Meatballs into a surprise box-office success. Stripes, Where the Buffalo Roam, Caddyshack, Tootsie (uncredited, so as not to distract) all built his reputation to where he was becoming a box-office phenomenon (and the capper, Ghostbusters, he agreed to star in to secure The Razor's Edge being made).

Byrum does a fine job directing the film: the locations (particularly the Tibetan ones) are lush and filled with color, and the performances are spot on: Theresa Russell does wonders with a role that can fall into cliche, but she brings a freshness to it that makes it all the more poignant, and Catherine Hicks makes her "Isabel" more sympathetic and far less hissable than she was in the 1946 adaptation.

The "sore thumb" is Murray—but not entirely. When called on to be dramatically appropriate he is there, but the temptation for the young star to punch up scenes with ad-libs that seem too contemporary or are dramatically inappropriate was not squelched by the director*—either because he owed Murray too much for getting it made, or because he didn't want to throw a bushel over Murray's "star-power."

And one can understand why Murray did it. Larry Darrell is supposed to be an attractive, if slightly remote and disconnected, man. There has to be a reason people care about him so much, especially as he abandons them to go off on his spiritual quest, and why Isabel takes the course of actions to keep him to herself. Tyrone Power, in the 1946 version, employed a "thousand yard stare" to suggest deep-seated consciousness, unconvincingly—and, he was Tyrone Power, and the man's "star quality" was sufficient motivation. But, Murray turns Larry from a "party-boy" to a troubled "slacker" with a goofy sense of humor. He's always the funniest guy in the room, and his quips are his expression of affection for his friends. It's the "silver chord" that is shared by pre-war Larry and post-war Larry, and that binds him to his old friends. It's a neat solution to the problem of Murray not being Tyrone Power in looks. But, Murray's funny is a bit too hip for a 1920's room. And though it may occasionally crack up his co-stars, it also makes him the odd man out in the entire scenario.

It's too bad. Given a bit more restraint, this might have been the adaptation of one of Maugham's best books. As its stands, it did make me dissatisfied enough to want to search out the original book, for which I'll always be grateful.

* The most egregious being Larry's empathetic subterfuge of presenting the stricken Uncle Elliott a much desired invitation to a function and Murray's ad-lib: "If it's a costume party you could wear that cute little bunny suit..." It's so out of left-field, especially at that particular juncture, that it undercuts one of the most dramatic moments of the movie, and Denholm Elliott's terrific performance, it's a bit grand-standing on Murray's part. Maybe I'm being unfair and it wasn't supposed to make the final cut and Columbia insisted there be more "Murray comedy," but it is such an artistic gaffe, that you would think that someone would have objected.