When Zanuck returned from service duty and took over from interim studio head William Goetz he was anything but pleased to have Preminger back on the Fox lot. At one point he reportedly told his nemesis that he would never direct a film as long as he was head of the studio, but if such declarations were truly etched in stone we would be bereft of so much of Hollywood history.
In so many instances, such declarations are abandoned when a crisis point looms. A troubled project needs attention and so grudges are abandoned. Two great Hollywood classics began as jinx films seemingly, at best, destined for B labels. One was the Warners classic Casablanca and the other was the film in which a teeth-gritting Zanuck worked with Preminger, the 1944 adaptation of the Vera Caspary novel Laura.
Rouben Mamoulian was Laura’s original director and the circumstances surrounding his departure and producer Preminger’s acceptance of Mamoulian’s earlier responsibility continues to be a matter of conjecture more than six decades later. Zanuck and Preminger, whose association appeared destined for dispute, clashed on two major casting points regard-ing the film. Ultimately Zanuck deferred to the film’s producer-director, whose judgment was vindicated.2
Earlier examples were provided regarding the homophobia pervasive in the Hollywood of the flourishing forties’ noir period. Zanuck added his own chapter regarding his stout opposition to Preminger’s determination to cast Broadway character performer Clifton Webb in the role of Waldo Lydecker. Zanuck’s opposition to Webb was summarized in a two-word comment used as a pejorative against alleged flighty homosexuals, “He flies.”
Preminger’s creative instincts told him that Webb would be ideal as a highly
sophis-ticated Manhattan columnist and radio commentator with a runaway superiority complex and a domineering Svengali attitude toward svelte and beautiful model Laura (Gene Tierney).
When Zanuck refused to see Webb or permit Preminger to test him, the inventive director filmed a performance of the actor, who was then appearing in a production at the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Ultimately Zanuck’s opposition was worn down.3
Even after filming had commenced, Zanuck, upon viewing production rushes, expressed dissatisfaction with the casting of Dana Andrews. He believed that John Hodiak, a Fox leading man that the studio boss was then assiduously building up, possessed a sturdy masculinity that Zanuck did not believe Andrews was conveying in the rushes. Once more Zanuck deferred to Preminger’s judgment.
Twentieth boss Zanuck’s comparison between Hodiak and Andrews failed to evaluate Preminger’s philosophy of filmmaking. To the Vienna-born director, bred into the Ger-man-Vienna school encompassing the likes of Lang, Wilder, and Siodmak, the issue was not embodied by comparative examples of masculinity on the part of leading men. There were those internal complications extending to Preminger’s fascination with moral ambi-guity.
Andrews was a favorite of Otto Preminger because of the internal complications he could bring to a role. It is one thing to view a leading man on the screen; it is another for audiences to view that individual on the one hand and fill in internal blanks on the other, empathizing with what is happening beneath the surface. In the case of Andrews he so totally empathizes with the painting of Laura he sees seemingly staring down at him from the living room of her apartment. He has become so captivated by her persona at a point when he believes she has been recently murdered that the brilliant Waldo Lydecker tartly informs Andrews that this is the first time he has ever seen anyone “fall in love with a corpse.”
One of the major thematic elements that made Laura a smashing success and catapulted it into the film noir category was its brooding quality as embodied in the title song written by David Raksin, which became every bit the enduring classic as the film. Andrews as brooding detective Harry McPherson invests the role with complicated internal life in the best Preminger tradition of moral ambiguity. The haunting quality of the song played repeatedly combined with the hypnotically tortured expression of Andrews addresses the element of how captivated and haunted he is by the image.
It is thematically beneficial to those seeking to understand Fallen Angel as a unit to closely evaluate the similarities between the roles Andrews played in each film. In each film Andrews is a complicated man who was raised in New York, the nation’s largest city and one riddled with complexities. The Great Depression is another element in the tough cir-cumstances in which Detective Mark McPherson and Eric Stanton grew up. Each has a rough-hewn intelligence, a street smartness.
Despite having been filmed entirely on the Twentieth Century–Fox lot, Laura offers a splendidly insightful look into the Park Avenue world of power and sophistication. What makes the Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Elizabeth Reinhardt adaptation of Vera Caspery’s novel scale film classic ranks is the manner in which the film’s three main characters impinge on one another. Clifton Webb in his most enduring dramatic role is Waldo Lydecker, a columnist and radio commentator intoxicated with his own power in the tena-cious Park Avenue power structure. He sees Laura as his personal property, operating as a Svengali and seeking to control her every move. While his interest is not sexual, he uses his power and influence to drive away men with a romantic influence who threaten his control.
McPherson falls in love with the image of Laura at a time when it appears she has been murdered. When it is learned that another model was killed instead and that all were oper-ating under a wrong impression, Laura is caught in a tug of war between the domineering Lydecker, by whom she does not wish to be dominated, and McPherson, with whom she falls in love. Meanwhile McPherson begins to realize that the egomaniacal Lydecker sought to kill Laura when he realized he could not control her.
A comparable three-tiered dramatic structure is also at work in Fallen Angel. There were numerous elements in common based on design by Zanuck and Preminger. In the 1945 work, however, Eric Stanton (Andrews) stands in the middle as he seeks to use June Mills (Alice Faye) to provide the necessary funds for what Stella (Linda Darnell) deems a proper marital foundation, without which she will not form a romantic attachment to the smooth-talking drifter.
The story element that sends the three-tiered involvement to another level is the murder of Stella. After that Eric, having been seen outside Stella’s apartment the evening of her death, becomes the prime suspect of New York City detective transplant Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), who is asked to head the investigation. Eric will ultimately turn the tables on Detective Judd by discovering his checkered past. In fact, Judd has a fixation on Stella just as Lydecker sought to control Laura, but whereas the columnist is interested in psychological
ATTENTIVEADMIRER— Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) watches from outside while sultry Stella (Linda Darnell) applies makeup as her boss, Pop (Percy Kilbride, later to achieve fame with Marjorie Main in the Ma and Pa Kettle series), looks on in the 1945 film Fallen Angel, directed by Otto Preminger.
control, Judd’s interest is of romantic fantasy fixation. He sits by the hour at Pop’s Café and drinks coffee, mesmerized at being in Stella’s presence.
Judd is not the only older man with strong romantic inclinations toward her. Stella is placed on a pedestal by her employer, Pop (Percy Kilbride), who dotes on her. Meanwhile, tough and beautiful Stella plays the field among the younger men. Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot), who services the jukebox in the restaurant, has dated her. He is not only questioned by Judd following her death, but subjected to police brutality, being victimized by backroom slapping with the experienced New York police detective transplant wearing the traditional kid gloves designed to produce pain without yielding marks. An airtight alibi clears Atkins, leaving Eric Stanton as Judd’s next suspect.