THE film, ‘LAURA’ of 1944 seems to have become a favourite of all those who have seen it. It has been written about in countless books and articles, and its scenes reproduced so many times, it is an entrenched Hollywood Classic.

There are several reasons why ‘Laura’’ is liked, by both men and women, not least of which is the fact that it is a mystery film centred around a beautiful, cultured young woman played stylishly by the unique off-beat Hollywood actress, Gene Tierney, who, as Laura, importantly, is quite free in her romantic relations with men, which brings her into tragic conflict with a snobbish wealthy patron and critic (Clifton Webb), who she manages to convince of her talent, until he takes her under his egotistic wing and makes her a popular success among New York’s cultured high society.
Other reasons for ‘Laura’s fame are its beautiful, clear black-and-white cinematography of wet New York sidewalks, house interiors, its fashion, witty dialogue, etc. Yet, we should not ignore the root of the film’s existence, which remains Vera Gasparay’s stunningly innovative American New Novel, ‘Laura’’, as innovative today as it was in 1941 when first published.
Its worth lay in three profound literary qualities linked to cinematic values, which are: Point of view, narrative tone, and detailed close-up and background visual description. This is why homegrown American fiction writers of the 1940s, such as Horace McCoy, Mickey Spillane, W.R. Burnett, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler, and William Faulkner wrote not only brilliant, high-quality cinematic novels and stories that were popular, but their visual and inner psychological coolness led to equally brilliant and popular Hollywood and French films that have stood the test of time, leaving high creative standards in writing and filmmaking.

Director Preminger
Gasparay’s 1941 novel, ‘Laura’’, is effective and original because it is written from the points of view of three characters: Laura’s sophisticated patron, the detective McPherson, and Laura herself. But Preminger’s film merely begins with a voice-over by Laura’s patron, played by a witty, fastidious and irritable Clifton Webb, after which the film emerges as a murder/mystery in which its very narrator is criminally guilty.
Director Otto Preminger’s originality, however, grasped the ability of Dana Andrews to signify the central issue of the film, which is a moral masculinity that is simple, direct, and coolly objective, unconcerned with any egotistical definition of the masculine, exercised in his role as the womanless detective McPherson, who finds himself in a milieu of educated but jaded wealthy professionals.
Andrews fits the role of the cool, unimpressed detective, because he proves the lone integrity of his profession, its ideal as the only person the anonymous public can depend on for unselfish justice.

Dana Andrews & style
The way Dana Andrews turns a chair around and sits on it before an effete Clifton Webb, while in a prestigious house where good manners disguises corruption; or when he falls asleep in Laura’s luxurious chair and apartment after reading her lovers letters for clues, as rain falls outside; the way he lets an unlit cigarette hang at the side of his mouth; the slur in his ambivalent voice; or when he silently plays with a miniature pocket pinball game, which irritates Laura’s guilty patron, who, as a biased closet homosexual, hates the benign natural masculinity Laura admires in Andrews, and says to him: “Will you stop playing with that thing!” to which Dana Andrews coolly continues, saying: “Well, I like it,” is the type of relaxed masculine identity which Dana Andrews projected, in film after film, like a civilized code of male self-contentment.

The Best Years of Our Lives
We need to jump forward to 1946, the year Dana Andrews laid down one of his greatest cool and sensitive masculine performances in ‘THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES’, directed by the wonderful William Wyler; a film that simply cannot be denied in any time period, by anyone anywhere, as one of the greatest American/Hollywood films ever made, both in terms of personal and social values, and the mastery with which a superb cast of actors and actresses, led by Dana Andrews, Frederic March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Harold Russell, and Virginia Mayo, demonstrates those values.
From Scene One, when Dana Andrews, with his bag on his shoulder, strides around an airlift depot, waiting for a flight back to his hometown at the end of World War II, we are put in the mood for an average male personality that rolls with the punches and disappointments, yet projects an inner masculine strength, which becomes the key to understanding himself, his position or status in the social world he is returning to after serving as a Squadron Leader in the just concluded battle.
We will see him chagrined, stranded with nowhere to go, outside of the door of the gallivanting girl he lived with before leaving for overseas. We will see March and Russell, his servicemen buddies, returning with him to their same hometown on a free flight, but affected now by reversed roles of power in civilian life.
The older Frederic March was Dana’s much lower subordinate in the War, but back home, in real life, he is a wealthy Bank Manager, waited on by a beautiful liberal wife (Myrna Loy), daughter (Teresa Wright, at her best), and young son, and living in a spacious, comfortable apartment, while Dana returns to a cramped little place, eating canned food, while looking for a job.
When Dana spends the night at March’s home, after  they went drinking on the town, and is heard having a nightmare by March’s sympathetic daughter, the scene of Dana’s head tossing on the pillow in cold sweat during a flashback of his plane in flames, shot down, while in his agonized sleep he screams: “Bail out! Bail out!” before Wright rushes in to comfort him, is Dana Andrews at his best, revealing the vulnerability of the masculine identity.
‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ was aptly endorsed by leading 1940s American Film critic, Bosley Crowther, as “Not only superlative entertainment, but food for quiet and humanizing thought,” and Dana Andrews tender, civilized renditions of the true masculine identity had a lot to do with this film’s sustained world-wide human relevance.