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The perfect noir comedy of desire, an erotic refraction played in dapper proximity to Hitchcock (what's taken from Rebecca is passed on to Vertigo). The famous opening introduces aristocratic Manhattan as a perfumed glass cabinet, a whip pan followed by a dolly-in reveals Waldo Lydecker (Clifton webb) soaking like Marat, his venomous typewriter suspended above the marble bathtub. Queenly aesthete and viperish columnist ("Sentiment comes easy at 50 cents a word"), he finds his Galatea in Laura (Gene Tierney) and helps with her ascension from Madison Avenue go-getter to shimmering socialite. A disfigured corpse brings out the blue-collar detective (Dana Andrews) and the shady bourgeoisie: A sponging playboy (Vincent Price), the "lean, strong body" easily toppled, and the dead girl's aunt (Judith Anderson), a sort of neurotic high-priestess of the penthouse set. In the remarkable central sequence, the saturnine lawman searches the victim's apartment, going through clothes and letters before pouring himself a drink and dozing off by the painted portrait above the fireplace. The aura is one of necrophiliac incantation, the audience on the armchair bewitched by the illusionist opening on the wall, the dreamer suddenly confronted by the reality that's just walked through the front door. "Kinda balls things up, doesn't it?" From the midpoint resurrection to the erect rifle in the antique clock, no bit of urbane surrealism escapes Otto Preminger's Viennese eye—he contemplates the Baudelairean specter that is the heroine through the trio of clods projecting their ideals onto her, not with severe interrogation lights but with the moody illumination of a continuously reframing camera. A feverish trance wrapped in a deadpan investigation, mirrored laterally by the rest of the filmmaker's career. "Love is stronger than life." The shattered clock fills the screen at the close, an ideal image for a suave entertainment unsettled by Preminger's mix of seamless classicism and inquisitive modernism. Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |