Released the same year as the better-remembered DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), LAURA is an evocative noir that both plays in and interrogates the femme fatale trope so crucial to the genre. In death, Laura Hunt is remembered by the people in her life as kind, beautiful, generous, powerful – just about everything a lover (or a friend, a fraud, or a cop) could ask for. But when the truth comes out, the audience is left to determine how much of the myth is really true, and what elements of Laura’s life are being hijacked to serve someone else’s narrative. In this episode, we discuss LAURA’s focus on possession and ownership of identity, its rhetoric for the end of the American dream as World War II came to a close, and how the film’s queer undertones complicate its central, brutal conflict. Check out the other movies in the Trylon’s “Murder, She Wrote” series: https://www.trylon.org/films/category/murder-she-wrote/ Listen to Harry’s appearance on Film Trace discussing THE FRENCH DISPATCH (2021) and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-french-dispatch-2021-and-the-royal-tenenbaums-2001/id1518610057?i=1000547290152 Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gmail.com to get in touch! Buy tickets and support the Trylon at https://www.trylon.org/. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: "Main Theme” from the LAURA soundtrack by David Raksin. Timestamps 0:00 - Episode 154: LAURA (1944) 3:19 - A quick round of applause for women 3:48 - The Patented Aaron Grossman Summary 6:46 - Jason’s thoughts 13:24 - Cody’s thoughts 18:36 - Harry’s thoughts 25:16 - Aaron’s thoughts 29:30 - What makes Laura a different kind of femme fatale 41:14 - McPherson’s internal class tensions 45:05 - Lydecker’s struggle to perform traditional masculinity 51:18 - Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter, the ‘kept man’ 56:31 - What Laura and McPherson represent to each other 59:14 - LAURA’s warning to noir audiences 1:05:29 - Final thoughts 1:10:47 - Cody’s Noteys – Trylove Wordle (not really wordle)
