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I'm not even sure if I can put into words what pure joy I receive from entering the highly stylized world of film noir. Some of you may blanch at the term, conjuring up images of dreaded black-and-white imagery, stilted acting, overly flashy cinematography, and the iciest of the femme fatales. Some of you, though, are like me, and revel any entrance into this world, one that probably only lived in the fevered imaginations of men like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. For us, film noir may never have been fully real, but it's hard to ignore the temptations the trusty gumshoes, the tart women, and even those curlicued lines of cigarette smoke offer. One film noir entry has been, until now, unfortunately ignored by me, but I was thrilled to find pleasure in the 1944 noir Laura.

What stands out with Laura, produced and directed by Otto Preminger, is that it's relatively bereft of big-name stars, or at least people who we consider big-name stars from the 1940s, or from film noir in general. The most recognizable name in this cast, to most of you, will be that of horror-movie stalwart Vincent Price. Price plays Shelby Carpenter, a raffish Southern playboy (oh yes, dear readers: Price does a Southern accent, and his goofy attempts simply make the performance even campier). Aside from Price, Laura stars Clifton Webb as a gay journalist with jealousy on the brain, Dana Andrews as a dedicated cop who begins to fall in love with the least likely person, and Gene Tierney as the titular woman who the movie - and all the characters within it - revolves around.

Most film buffs know very well, of course, about the infamous Hayes Code, which was heavily enforced from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s in Hollywood. In essence, the Hayes Code was to movies then what the Motion Picture Association of America is to movies now...except the Hayes Code was worse. This was a time when movies couldn't have sex onscreen; hell, if two characters were kissing (and you know they couldn't be of the same gender), they could only do so for a few seconds at a time; this rule was famously skewered in the Hitchcock classic Notorious. Basically, for filmmakers to bring more adult content to the masses, they had to skirt around things a lot. The best example in Laura is Webb's character, Waldo Lydecker. Lydecker, a slimy New York journalist, is strongly implied to be gay, but it's never said.

How does Preminger make this clear to the discerning audience member without actually saying it? Well, for example, he opens the movie with Lydecker being interrogated by that dedicated cop, Mark McPherson. In the bathroom. In the bathtub, actually. Naked. Not just that, but Webb's delivery of all his lines in this scene is not only meant to be wicked, but some kind of lascivious, too. He throws out the challenge to McPherson to throw him a towel, and everyone in and out of the movie knows exactly what he's talking about. Yet, for all the noir elements present in Laura, a movie like this is more about the fantasies that are represented by the perfect woman, what the perfect woman is, and what such a woman can do to even the best of men.

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