Laura Analysis

Laura

Directed and Produced by: Otto Preminger

4th in the AFI's list of Top 10 Mystery Movies ever made.

This is a 1944 American film noir, the premise of this film is about a detective who falls in love with woman whose murder he is investigating. The premise can get complex as the film subtly explores ideas like necrophilia, absurdity. The film starts with the detective asking questions to the suspects and they narrating how they met her and what was their relationship like in flashbacks, this is how we get to know about Laura as a person.

Let's take a look at the origins of film noir, when the anti-hero gangster films like Scarface and Public Enemy where working in the 1930s the Motion Picture Production Code was started when the film shouldn't endorse or glorify violence and breaking the law. But the hunger for morally ambiguous stories didn't die from the audience and definitely didn't for the filmmakers. Then is when they started making films in the genre of film noir, where there is a detective who is solving the murder. We can have these moral ambiguity in the criminals and the deeds they do, but since the protagonist is mostly the detective they are on the right side of the law. We can say that the film noir ended when the code was abolished and again films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and the new Hollywood wave started which mostly made films about the anti-heroes.