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CORRIDOR OF NOIR |
DARK
CORRIDORS VOL. 2, No. 22 |
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LAURA: HOW THE FAMOUS FILM OBSCURES THE CLASSIC NOVEL |
 Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) spends an evening alone with the portrait of Gene Tierney as Laura Hunt, one of the indelible images from the movie version of "Laura." |
Images from the 1944 film
haunt Caspary's classic novel
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If you haven't seen the movie "Laura" or read the novel, you should do it before reading this column because key plot surprises are revealed. |
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
WHENEVER I THINK of Waldo Lydecker, my favorite character from Otto Preminger's classic 1944 mystery classic "Laura," I always picture Clifton Webb in his bathtub, writing his acerbic newspaper column on his portable typewriter, mounted on a platform over the sudsy water, making sardonic remarks to detective Dana Andrews.
No wonder. Webb turned in one of Hollywood's greatest all-time screen performances as Waldo Lydecker, earning a supporting actor Oscar nomination in the process. (He lost to Barry Fitzgerald of "Going My Way" that year.) Thanks to Webb, Waldo is vividly remembered by most of us as the epitome of the effete urban columnist, a cold-blooded, self-centered bachelor who tells young advertising sales rep Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) he won't endorse a fountain pen because "I write with a goose quill, dipped in venom."
But the image we retain of Waldo Lydecker isn't the image first created by mystery writer Vera Caspary, whose "Laura" was an enormous best-seller in 1942-43 and is still regarded as one of America's classic mystery novels.
In that still-entrancing novel, Waldo is a huge, enormously fat man, fashioned more along the lines of actor Laird Cregar ("The Lodger," "Hangover Square"), who also was under contract to 20th Century-Fox in 1944. I don't know if Preminger ever considered Cregar for the role of Waldo, but it might have been his final role anyway since he died late in 1944 at age 28 while undergoing radical dieting to scale the pounds off his 6 foot 3 inch frame.
Does it make any difference that Waldo is reed-thin in the movie and fat in the book? That's a judgment call, but Waldo's enormous girth makes his fatal attraction to Laura all the more hopeless in the book. In the film, you might imagine the beautiful, streamlined Gene Tierney being attracted to the fussy, suave Clifton Webb--but you wouldn't have bought it if Preminger had cast Laird Cregar or Sydney Greenstreet as Waldo.
There's another element of Waldo's character that comes out much more openly in the book than the movie: The fact that Waldo is rather obviously homosexual. I'm guessing you couldn't come right out and describe someone as gay in a work of popular fiction in the early 1940s, but Vera Caspary planted all kinds of major hints at Waldo's sexual orientation in the novel.
In the film, director Preminger tiptoes around the issue, although it probably was considered a bold stroke among Hollywood insiders to cast Webb as Waldo because there was little mystery about Webb's orientation and Preminger surely knew Webb would bring a certain swishiness to the character even if the script didn't call for it.
As a matter of fact, film historian Leonard Maltin has reported that Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck initially opposed the casting of Webb as Waldo because he considered the actor "too effeminate." Preminger was right, though, because Webb's performance is one of the greatest--and it turned him into a golden commodity at the studio, leading to his immortal Mr. Belvedere character in "Sitting Pretty" as well as many other hit films for Fox.
Waldo's size and sexual orientation weren't the only things the movie changed, though. In the book, Waldo is known around New York for his swaggering style--and for his rather affected habit of carrying a walking stick wherever he goes. The movie changes that walking stick to a simple cane--and eliminates a major plot surprise in the process.
In both movie and book, the murder is committed by a killer armed with what appears to have been a sawed-off shotgun that fired a blast of b.b. shot directly into the face of the victim. The murder weapon isn't immediately found, but suspicion falls upon Laura's fiance, Shelby Carpenter, who owned a shotgun that turns out to have been fired recently.
Those who remember Caspary's novel, though, may have forgotten that Waldo Lydecker has been carrying the murder weapon all along: A shotgun built into his trademark walking stick!
The movie changes this key gimmick and diverts our attention to an antique grandfather-style clock in Laura's apartment--a gift on loan from Waldo. As improbable as it sounds, the movie has Waldo conceal the shotgun in a secret compartment in the clock after committing the murder.
Caspary's gimmick is the better one because it allows the arrogant Waldo to carry the murder weapon all through the story--even allowing detective Mark McPherson to handle it on one occasion. This is very Waldo-like. He'd love to flaunt the weapon like that under the very nose of the detective, further establishing his intellectual superiority over the dumb cop.
What's more, I can't imagine an effete man like Waldo ever using a sawed-off shotgun, which strikes me as a sort of gangster weapon. He's a born sword-in-cane type killer, so Caspary's lethal walking stick seems absolutely perfect for him.
Still, I'm betting most of us remember what the movie showed us, even if we read the original novel and loved it. I think that's endemic to the film medium: Its visual imagery is so much more powerful than the written word that we can't get those images out of our mind, even if we purposely try.
For example, Caspary certainly does her best to make us understand that Detective McPherson is falling in love with Laura, a woman he has never seen in person, but who seems to embody everything he wants in a woman--beauty, thoughtfulness, intelligence and success.
But Preminger's film wallops us with that core truth about the story in just one vivid sequence in which McPherson, played in laconic style by Dana Andrews, spends an evening alone in the dead girl's apartment, staring at the portrait of Laura on the wall, drinking from her liquor cabinet and playing her music on her phonograph. (To nobody's surprise, the record on the turntable is a lush instrumental version of David Raksin's haunting "Laura" theme, which has become one of the most memorable of all movie themes.)
In fact, the still photo from the movie that show Andrews gazing up at Tierney's painted likeness seems to capture the whole essence of "Laura" in a single visual image. If you ever doubt the power of film imagery, just look at that photo and you'll think you know everything you need to know about the movie and the book called "Laura."
I don't mean to be making a case against the motion picture medium for making us forget the images we're supposed to draw from a book. My advice is simple: Read the book before you see the movie. I try to do this all the time because I don't want to visualize the actor who played the part when I read the description the author gives me on the printed page. I want to experience the author's vision first, then decide if I agree with the way Hollywood cast the parts.
I couldn't do that with "Laura" because I was only three years old when the book first was published and five when the movie came out. I saw the movie maybe five or six times before I read the book, so the movie images were stuck fast in my mind: Tierney, Andrews and Webb as Laura, McPherson and Waldo; Vincent Price as Shelby, Judith Anderson as Mrs. Treadwell and the murder weapon hidden in the clock.
But I later discovered the book and the film each have wonderful elements that still deserve our appreciation. If you've seen the film, but never read the book, please make up for that oversight as soon as possible. The book is a quick read and it's loaded with wit and colorful 1940s New York urbania. You may be surprised at how different Waldo comes off in the book, but I think you'll decide Tierney and Andrews were the perfect Laura and McPherson.
As for the movie, I can't imagine anyone who hasn't yet seen "Laura." It's a noir classic from the very moment Waldo begins his narration with the words, "I shall never forget the weekend Laura died..."
I dare say none of the rest of us will forget it either.
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
The photo from "Laura" is © 1944 by Twentieth
Century Fox.
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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