Otto Preminger’s Laura definitely deserves to be remembered. The cinematography follows in the footsteps of Citizen Kane in how it portrays the main character through camera tricks and storytelling.

(SPOILER ALERT) Lydecker did it. Ok? At the point in the movie where we find out about this, you do not even care really. Lydecker becomes irrelevant. However there are some huge hints throughout the movie that range from obvious too subtle. The obvious hint is when McPhearson arrests Laura and Lydecker is excited that she is the one getting arrested, not him.

Other moments where Lydecker’s guilt is foreshadowed are subtler. Lydecker owns a pair of unique clocks and gave Laura one of them. When this was mentioned, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince popped into my head. It seemed a lot like the vanishing cabinets kept in the room of requirement, in Hogwarts, and the other was in Borgan and Burkes, which was in Knockturn Alley, the shopping center for dark wizards. The cabinets were used to send items that would be used to kill Dumbledore. Which is ironic because that clock is where Lydecker hid the shotgun he used to kill the model Vincent Price’s character was bangin’ at Laura’s place thinking it was Laura.



Other things that were noticeable in the way the movie was shot was that at certain moments in the film, Lydecker cast a very strong shadow, hinting to his ill intentions. Other characters of course had shadows, but were none were as eye grabbing as Lydecker’s. As he was leaving Laura’s apartment near the end of the movie his shadow was extremely dark. Also, McPhearson would only pull out that little baseball game, like he is trying to figure out Lydecker, to physically put the pieces in place, much like Kane’s second wife with the jigsaw puzzles.

Femme Fatal, the text we read for this movie sheds some light on the sexual symbolism of the characters in Laura. There is no Femme Fatal in the forefront movie, the title character is the epitome of the ideal woman. Her picture in the living room of her apartment is so enchanting you begin to fall in love with the softness of her character just from that picture. The picture has a kind of gravity to it that draws you in. It is the best prop in the movie.

The review of Laura also mentioned the spectrum covered by Lydecker, McPhearson, and Carpenter. Lydecker is high class, high society, and flaming. He appears to represent an extreme of Laura’s taste. Carpenter is a suave man who is skating by in life no his looks and his charm. Kind of like a free-loading Han Solo character. McPhearson is the man’s man, clever, and rugged. These three characters are three different kinds of men and Laura finds herself in the middle, even though she is dead.

In class we talked about the triangle formed in the scene when Laura returns home from the country . McPhearson is passed out on the chair from drinking and the shot has Laura’s portrait in the background to almost suggest what he is dreaming about. When she comes in and sees McPhearson sleeping the camera gives us Laura on the left, the Portrait between the two and above, and McPhearson to the right. It is as if the Portrait is a character itself that McPhearson has fallen in love with and now he has to distinguish between the two Lauras.