My witticisms and bons mots — in either writing or in conversation — aren’t bad, but they aren’t quite up to the standard of 1940s cinematic banter, either. I do egotistically like to think of myself as being as quick-witted and arch (and befreckled) as Katharine Hepburn as the brilliant trouser-wearing international journalist who sets off a blaze of sparks bickering with her sportswriter colleague played by Spencer Tracy in “Woman of the Year” (1942), but — as in all things — the reality of human conversation never quite achieves the glory of conversation as represented among the urbane sophisticates in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production.
I’ve admitted it before and I’ll admit it again: My ideas of reality and my expectations of how life should go were formed, for better or worse, by watching too many old movies as a kid. I’d hide upstairs all day in the room we called “the play room” to watch the movie stars of decades gone by on a small, black-and-white television the size and shape of a box you’d buy a bowling ball in. In my childhood in the 1970s, we had very little adult supervision, of course. Flipping through the channels on a TV set that got its staticky reception from an actual metal antenna, there was nothing to stumble upon that was much more pernicious or corrupting than “Charlie’s Angels” or “The Miss America Pageant.” This was before Cablevision stretched its cables all the way out to Bonac, and there was no chance we small children might accidentally stumble upon the sight of a staticky and naked Robin Byrd. But, still, the adults were all at work all the time and there was no one in authority hanging around the house to stop me and my brothers from doing things like shooting at passing cars with a BB gun (them) or spending eight hours straight on a Sunday afternoon watching old movies on Channel 11 (me).
“I was raised by wolves,” I told my friend Sarah the other night as we exited the Sag Harbor Cinema after an evening showing of “Laura” (1944). “By wolves and by Barbara Stanwyck.”
The movie “Laura,” directed by Otto Preminger and the latest in this season’s Summer Noir series at Sag Harbor, is distinguished and particularly entertaining in several memorable ways.
First, there is the wonderful face of its leading lady, Gene Tierney. She’s great to look at — moving about the screen in an array of stupendous hats (particularly a pair of very floppy ones with brims that fall on either side of her head like donkey ears) and wartime skirt suits of varying degrees on the scale from chic to homely (little sweater sets trimmed with gingham, natty striped numbers, and vaguely medieval-looking rayon sets tied at the clavicle with a bow) — but, otherwise, her personality rather leaves me cold. You’ll have to excuse me, movie fans, but Gene Tierney’s personality was a bit of a void. Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox supposedly called her “unquestionably, the most beautiful woman in movie history,” but Darryl F. Zanuck was wrong; the unquestionably most beautiful woman in movie history was, obviously, Ava Gardner.
Second, there is the performance of pointy-nosed little Clifton Webb, with one arched eyebrow, as the acid-tongued newspaper and radio columnist Waldo Lydecker. Waldo is an older man who mentors Gene Tierney’s 22-year-old advertising executive, the Laura Hunt of the film’s title, offering her advice on how to dress (strapless evening gowns of the style popularized by the “Debutante of the Century,” Brenda Frazier, in 1939); how to command attention at business meetings, at a conference table surrounded otherwise by middle-aged men; how to court press coverage, and how improve “her mind and her appearance.” Waldo is, like all good columnists, an insufferable egotist. He says things like, “In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.” And: “I’m not kind, I’m vicious. It’s the secret of my charm.”
I let out a laugh, audibly, when young Laura gushes to Waldo, “You write about people with such real understanding and sentiment. That’s what makes your column so good,” and he cracks back: “Sentiment comes easily at 50 cents a word.” Fifty cents a word? In 1944? That’s a “wow!” We were making around a dollar a word in the magazine-columnist biz around the year 2000, but I can attest that the average per-word compensation for your typical acid-tongued columnist has fallen well below Waldo Lydecker rates today, in 2026. Wow.
Third in the list of what makes “Laura” such a fun watch is the interior decor of the characters’ incredibly fussy Manhattan apartments. Someone in the set-dressing department at M.G.M. went absolutely bananas! They ran amok! One wonders if whoever it was had gotten ahold of a bottle of early-amphetamine “pep pills” in Hollywood, somehow. Someone must have been on bennies when they dressed every table lamp with an eyelet-lace skirt and then tied it around with a bow in contrasting black taffeta. The furnishings in Waldo’s apartment reflect the sophistication of the urban elite circa World War II, with lots of Chinese ginger vases, French Second Empire settees, Staffordshire-like statuettes on shelves and mantels, and tribal masks from Asia or Africa on the walls. But the window treatments? Sarah and I giggled and giggled at the ruffled chiffon sheers layered everywhere behind heavy damask drapes, adorned with a baroque array of cornices, pelmets, and valances, tied with tassels and swags. The curtain budget for “Laura” must have been phenomenal.
The Manhattan apartment that Laura/Gene Tierney goes home to after an evening with Waldo at El Morocco is done up in coordinate suites of white furniture . . . and curlicues. The carvings on her white bedroom set are curlicued; the mantelpiece on the fireplace in her vast living room has stone curlicues; the mirror by the door is framed in curlicued gold. It’s an aesthetic that it is hard to understand at this great temporal remove from the year 1944. The overstuffed armchairs, mind you, are beautifully upholstered in floral chintz. I would like to own Laura Hunt’s armchairs.
Anyway, as someone who shares their ink-stained profession myself, I am always delighted by the awe-imposing importance granted to the character of the all-powerful columnist in a string of great movies from this era: It’s not just Waldo Lydecker. You must remember the imperious critic Addison DeWitt, opposite Bette Davis, in “All About Eve” (1950)? What about Burt Lancaster as the syndicated columnist J.J. Hunsecker in “The Sweet Smell of Success” (1957)? Waldo dictates thoughts and ideas to the cowed and sheeplike (altogether cud-chewing) radio-listening masses, typing up his intelligent and nasty opinions while sitting in a dark-marble bathtub fitted out with a tray that holds the typewriter. I’ve got the columnist’s imperious attitude down pat. And I’ve got a bathtub, although it’s the basic white-enamel kind, and even a tray that sits across it, but it’s not substantial enough to hold the weight of a typewriter.
My idea of what adult life would be like, informed as it was by viewing so many noirs, dramas, and screwball comedies between the ages of 10 and 16? My idea was that I’d have a Manhattan apartment with a butler’s pantry, a devoted Irish maid, a well-stocked bar cart, a closet filled with strapless evening dresses, and a bedroom large enough for not just a canopy bed but a vanity table topped with crystal flasks of scent, carried across the Atlantic by my admirers. Note: The maid’s name in “Laura” is Bess. Nerts to that.