Last week, I watched Laura for maybe the twentieth time, during Turner Classic Movies’ glorious annual 31 Days of Oscar marathon. The 1944 film-noir gem is a master class in the lost trade of screenwriting and film construction. People forced to endure the slop that passes for cinema today have little notion of the labor and artistry that went into movie production under the studio system, beginning with the dramaturgy and very much including the now forgotten music score.
And they can start by helping girls resist the anti-man crap being thrown at them by Democrats and Disney.
As marvelous as is every aspect of Laura, David Raskin’s haunting theme for the picture — about disparate characters affected by the murder of a dynamic beauty is a stand apart symphonic classic. Last week, the industry newspaper Variety took a break from hyping this year’s Oscar junk to cite great film scores snubbed by the Academy. Laura was number one. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: The Conservative Writer’s Block)
It’s a testimony to how much the old filmmakers respected their audience, and how hard they worked to entertain it. Compare the lovely opening titles of Laura to any modern movie, which routinely omits the main credits in a hurry to start the dreck. Or the very first line of the picture to anything written today: “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” The lowest listed crew member in Laura and his or her successors will forever have something to be proud of — the family name on a masterpiece.
Boy, could Hollywood ever use this lesson, having just suffered another disastrous weekend at the box-office. The tally was down 32 percent over the same period last year to a total of $64 million. As Breitbart’s John Nolte brutally put it, “That’s not what one movie earned this weekend. This is what ALL the movies earned.” Every filmmaker who contributed to this catastrophe should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch Laura — only in a soundproof screening room to silence their triggered screams.
Yet there’s another group that would most benefit from watching Laura — feminists. Anticipating the ridiculous Hollywoke mandate that only women can fictionalize women — by which they mean feminist women — the writer of the novel and the movie, Vera Caspary, created a memorable one based on actual female nature not progressive fantasy. Caspary’s Laura Hunt is herself a feminist, at least initially. Though unlike the bitter, angry, deliberately ugly modern incarnations of this errant ideology, she’s an enticing, feminine, and thoroughly believable girl.
As the Amazon book blurb describes her, “Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charms — not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to investigate her murder.” And Caspary was a good and true enough writer to make her male characters just as three-dimensional. They included not only Laura’s two beta male suitors — Waldo Lydecker and Shelby Carpenter — but tough cop Mark McPherson, a “toxic male” by contemporary standards whom no Hollywoke screenwriter, female or male, could approximate today.
Otto Preminger’s brilliant film version brought these characters to immortal life, especially with his perfect casting of the stunning Gene Tierney in the lead. If feminists could get over their indoctrinated revulsion to grace and beauty, and their antipathy to real men, they might gleam something of value from Tierney’s Laura. Such as in one scene with Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews in one of two classic roles along with The Best Years of Our Lives).
In the kitchen with the sophisticated, alluring Laura, McPherson acts surprised when she takes over the stove. “Don’t tell me you can cook,” he says chauvinistically. Laura answers, “My mother always listened sympathetically to my dreams of a career, and then taught me another recipe.” This simple perfect line may be offensive to the feminist brain, but it offers profound wisdom to the rare open mind — and threatens one insane political party and its media lapdogs. (READ MORE: The Decline and Fall of Hollywoke)
Former Democratic Senator and current MSNBC analyst Claire McCaskill bridges both dystopian worlds. Last week, McCaskill demanded that the liberal press cease even its reluctant fact checking of Joe Biden because it might help Donald Trump. “I move that every newspaper in America quits doing any fact checks on Joe Biden until they fact check Donald Trump every morning on the front page,” she said.
This prompted a response from normally measured Dilbert creator and persuasion expert Scott Adams. “Batsh_t crazy women have taken over the Democratic party,” he posted on X. “None of this looks like politics to me. Looks like organized mental illness.”
Adams may be on to something, according to a new Gallup survey. The survey found that young women are increasingly moving left, and are 15 percentage points more likely to identify as liberal than men in the same group. The gap is five times larger than it was in 2000, with social and mainstream media leftist propaganda cited as chief factors. Yet men subject to the same influences have become more conservative. Consequently, it will be up to them to rescue the damsels in disorientation. (READ MORE: The Woke of Zorro)
And they can start by helping girls resist the anti-man crap being thrown at them by Democrats and Disney, and getting them to watch fine art like Laura. Until the shrews and wimps brainwashing them can only whine the way Waldo Lydecker (played brilliantly by Clifton Webb in the film) does after losing Laura to tough guy McPherson. “It’s the same obvious pattern, Laura. If McPherson weren’t muscular and handsome in a cheap sort of way, you’d see through him in a second.” One second is all it takes to start a family and exit madness.