Otto Preminger's classic 1944 Crime-Noir/Thriller/Mystery film, Laura is an interesting film with an equally interesting cast of notable actors and actresses.

The stunningly beautiful Gene Tierney (Oscar Nominated for Leave Her To Heaven) plays Laura Hunt, a woman who has recently been murdered by a shotgun blast to the face. Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews of The Ox-Bow Incident) has been assigned to find out who killed her and why. The first two people who he's going to go after are her fiance Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price of The Pit And The Pendulum and her ex-boyfriend Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in this film).

As McPherson goes about putting the pieces of the puzzle together, he's soon starting to obsess over the portrait of Laura that hangs over the fireplace in her apartment. He begins to fall for her a little bit, and is soon confronted by her face to face when she wanders into her apartment to find him sitting in her living room after a weekend away - healthy as can be. With Laura alive and well, McPherson has to work over time to figure out who the victim really was, who shot her dead, and most importantly, why they did it.

Preminger, who started off simply producing the film only to step in as director once Rouben Mamoulian was taken off the project, does a great job of slowly but surely building the tension. The more we get to know the two main suspects in the case the more we begin to distrust them. Shelby, at first a happy go lucky playboy and man about town, is actually down on his luck and all image. Waldo, socialite columnist for the local newspaper and a man who possesses an extremely acerbic wit, is actually a possessive and egotistic man who only thinks of himself. Laura is, to coin a phrase, who every woman wants to be and who every man wants to be with. She's gorgeous, smart, and it's easy to see why the three men in the story all obsess over her by the time that the end credits hit the screen. Tierney does a fantastic job portraying enough classical doe eyed beauty to nail the 'looks' part, but handles the character traits her character requires equally well. Price, in a rare and early non-horror role, is great as the young Shelby, his tall frame filling up the room when he enters and instantly drawing attention to himself by doing so. Clifton Webb is perfect as Waldo, and justly earned that Oscar nod even if he didn't win. He's a flamboyant and at times rather cruel man, and Webb quite simply nails the part. Dana Andrews is tough as nails, referring to all the women in his life as 'dolls' or 'dames' and he makes for an interesting contrast aside Waldo's high society snobbery.

This is a crime noir though, and what would a crime noir be without murky shadows and dimly light sets? There's plenty of that here too. When McPherson enters Laura's kitchen the light that shines through the vertical blinds and paints black and white stripes up and down his body and the counter behind him is an instantly recognizable crime noir motif, and the use of shadows and light does a perfectly wonderful job of basking the characters in just enough luminescence to capture all of their striking features.

Video:

Laura is presented in its original fullframe aspect ratio at 1.33.1. The contrast levels look very nice and the clean and detailed transfer does justice to the elegant shadows and detail that the camera captures. While there is some mild print damage here and there primarily in the form of specks and a scratch or two, for the most part the picture does look very nice. Edge enhancement and shimmering are noticeable particularly on the lines in the plaid on a characters jacket but are kept to a minimum for the most part and I didn't detect any compression artifacts laying about in the blacks, which remain deep and solid throughout.