In Love with a Corpse
Comparing Laura and Vertigo

Miles David Moore

SPOILER ALERT: The following essay reveals and discusses major plot developments in two classic movies: Laura, the 1944 film by Otto Preminger, and Vertigo, the 1958 film by Alfred Hitchcock.  Please see both films before you read this essay.  If you haven't seen Laura or Vertigo, what are you waiting for?

One woman walks through the door.  Another falls from a bell tower. 

That is the difference between the fates of Mark McPherson and John "Scottie" Ferguson.  "You'd better watch out, McPherson, or you'll end up in a psychiatric ward," Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) tells McPherson (Dana Andrews) toward the midpoint of Laura.  "I don't think they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse."  Ferguson (James Stewart) does end up in a psychiatric ward just after the midpoint of Vertigo, for that very reason.  In both movies, the crux of their stories has yet to be revealed. 

The resolution of McPherson's story will take a day; Ferguson's, more than a year.  Only McPherson's ending will be happy.

McPherson and Ferguson are damaged men.  Both are police detectives—McPherson in New York, Ferguson in San Francisco—and both have traumatic service records.

We learn of McPherson's troubles in passing when he meets Waldo in the first scene of Laura.  "McPherson?  Mark McPherson!"  Waldo says. "Aren't you the one with the leg full of lead?"  We see Ferguson's peril in terrifying detail at the beginning of Vertigo.  He and a uniformed policeman are chasing a suspect across rooftops when Ferguson slips and falls, hanging for dear life from a rain gutter.  The uniformed cop tries to save Ferguson, but instead falls to his death.  The last thing we see is a close-up of Ferguson's agonized face as he clings to the gutter.

We already surmise that Preminger's storytelling is concise, Hitchcock's more leisurely.  (Laura runs a mere 88 minutes, compared with Vertigo's 128.)  We see this further in the presentation of how their ordeals affected their personalities and their love lives.  McPherson speaks of one "dame" who "got a fox fur" out of him, and another who kept walking him past furniture stores to look at parlor suites. He says this coolly, impersonally, the way he says everything. But we get the impression that McPherson's coolness is a façade. We're clued in by the baseball puzzle he plays with constantly.  Waldo shouts, "Will you stop playing with that infernal puzzle? It's getting on my nerves!" McPherson replies, "I know, but it keeps me calm."

The next thing we see of Ferguson after the rooftop, he is in the apartment of Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a commercial artist and college classmate who was briefly his fiancée.  We learn that Ferguson is nearly healed from his injuries but was obliged to take early retirement from the force.  We learn that an old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), whom Midge doesn't remember, has asked to see him.  We learn it was Midge who broke off the engagement with Ferguson, but a slight upward glance tells us her feelings toward him are more romantic than she lets on.

Above all, we learn that Ferguson's virulent acrophobia can be triggered by as little as the top step of a stepstool. Ferguson's folksy "Jimmy Stewart" persona is even more brittle than McPherson's aloofness, barely concealing a morass of inchoate fear.

McPherson is investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a young advertising executive whose face was blown off by a shotgun.  The main suspects are Waldo, a newspaper columnist and Laura's mentor; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a cad who was Laura's fiancé; and Anne Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura's wealthy and predatory aunt, who has obvious designs on Carpenter.

The case Elster offers Ferguson is murkier.  Elster, a shipping magnate, asks Ferguson to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak).  Elster claims Madeleine is acting strangely, and he is worried she will come to harm. Tailing Madeleine on her usual trips to a flower shop, a churchyard, an old hotel, and a museum, Ferguson discovers that Madeleine is obsessed by Carlotta Valdes, a 19th-century San Franciscan who killed herself after her wealthy lover abandoned her and took her baby.  Elster tells Ferguson that Carlotta was Madeleine's great -grandmother—yet Madeleine has never heard of Carlotta.  He says he believes Madeleine is possessed by the same suicidal madness that destroyed Carlotta.

McPherson reads Laura's diary, hears stories from witnesses about Laura's kindness and warmth—"a real fine lady," as Bessie (Dorothy Adams), her housekeeper, says—and sees the glamorous portrait of Laura by Jacoby, a former suitor of Laura's.  Waldo belittles the portrait, but Mark is drawn to it.  He is sitting alone in Laura's apartment, staring at the portrait and drinking the greater part of a bottle of scotch, when Waldo drops by, delivering his line about being in love with a corpse.  Waldo leaves, and McPherson, sodden with grief and scotch, falls asleep.

Then a key turns in the lock, and Laura walks in. McPherson has the shock of his life. Thirty seconds later, when McPherson shows her a newspaper headline, Laura has the shock of hers.

Ferguson follows Madeleine to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.  He watches as she pulls the petals from her nosegay—the same one she buys every day, identical to the one in Carlotta's portrait at the Palace of the Legion of Honor—and tosses them into the Bay.  Then she jumps in.  Ferguson rescues her.  Soon they go everywhere together.  They kiss passionately, they pledge their love.  But Madeleine cannot overcome her suicidal urges.  One day at the Mission of San Juan Bautista, she breaks away from him and runs into the bell tower. She races up the stairs; he is too paralyzed by fear to follow her.  Through a window, he sees her fall.

There is the horror of the inquest, in which the evil coroner played by Henry Jones all but indicts Ferguson for Madeleine's murder ("The law has little to say about things left undone"); the nightmare sequence, with Ferguson falling eternally into the abyss; and the long, catatonic stay in the sanitarium.  Midge—who followed Ferguson and Madeleine around San Francisco, who tried to attract him by painting herself as Carlotta but merely angered him—hangs helplessly around Ferguson's room and finally vanishes from the film, departing down a long, dark corridor.

It is here that the films truly diverge.  Laura from this point becomes a straightfoward, though exceptionally persuasive and atmospheric, murder mystery.  The victim turns out to be Diane Redfern, a model who resembled Laura in body type and hair color.  Carpenter had brought Diane to Laura's apartment for a tryst, knowing Laura would be away.  Diane was wearing Laura's robe and slippers when she answered the doorbell in a dark living room and was met with a shotgun blast in the face.

Vertigo is anything but straightforward.  Ferguson, released from the asylum after a year but still obsessed with Madeleine, sees a woman on the street.  She is cheap -looking, but Ferguson notices something about her—something reminiscent of Madeleine.  He follows her to her hotel.  Reluctantly she tells him her name is Judy Barton, she is from Kansas, she works at I. Magnin.  Ferguson asks Judy out to dinner.  She accepts, and he says he will come back in a few hours.  He leaves; her expression becomes sorrowful.  She sits down with pen and paper.

"So—you finally found me," she writes. 

Judy was part of Elster's plot to murder his wife. Elster had her disguise herself as Madeleine--dyeing her hair blonde, adopting Madeleine's sophisticated fashion style, enacting the elaborate script Elster devised.  Elster left San Francisco for parts unknown after the inquest; Judy lingered there, partly out of guilt, partly because she was still in love with Ferguson and wanted to see him again.  Judy tears up her confession, goes to dinner with Ferguson, and quickly subordinates her life to his.

McPherson's job becomes harder after Laura's appearance, compounded by his emotional shock.  He wants to protect Laura from the killer, but simultaneously wonders if she is implicated in Diane's murder, or even the murderer herself.  The suspicious behavior of Shelby Carpenter—especially some skullduggery involving a shotgun and a key to Laura's apartment—adds to McPherson's unease.  However , his main suspect—who is in time revealed to be the killer—is Waldo.  From the first Waldo's self-aggrandizement ("I was the only person who truly knew her") and narcissistic attitude toward Laura ("she became as famous as Waldo Lydecker's walking stick, or his white carnation") arouses McPherson's
suspicions.  A close-up of McPherson after he and Waldo leave a restaurant together signifies that he is nearly certain Waldo is the murderer. 

For Ferguson, there's no indication that there's even been a murder until near the end of Vertigo.  One thing matters to him until then: regaining Madeleine.  Toward that end he forces Judy to dye her hair and change her style of dress.  ("It can't matter that much to you," he keeps telling her.)  Ferguson's obsession borders on sadism, and Judy—mired in love and guilt—is too weak-willed to gainsay him. 

Laura Hunt, on the other hand, is notably strong-willed.  The night she returns to her apartment, McPherson makes her promise not to leave it; instead, she calls Carpenter and goes out to meet him.  The next morning, she tells McPherson that she will never be bound by any oath she does not take of her own free will.  Men in the 1940s did not necessarily appreciate women with minds of their own, and that is partly why McPherson engages in a little sadism of his own.  He hauls Laura to the police station and grills her, among other things, on whether she is still in love with Carpenter.  "I don't know how I ever could have been," she answers.

McPherson apologizes to Laura.  "I was 99-percent sure you were innocent, but I had to get rid of that one-percent doubt," he says.  "I reached the point where I needed official surroundings."  Laura forgives him: "Then it was worth it, Mark."

In seeking clarity for himself, McPherson also helps Laura clear her own mind.  Vera Caspary, in the original novel of Laura,has Laura try to explain how she fell in with vipers such as Waldo and Carpenter.  In the movie, it works much better for McPherson to say, "For a beautiful, intelligent girl you've surrounded yourself with a prize collection of dopes."  Laura acts quickly on this realization.  "For the first time in ages I know what I'm doing," she tells Waldo in dismissing him for good.

Forgiveness plays no part in the ending of Vertigo, and clarity leads only to ruin.  Judy, in a subliminal desire for exposure and punishment, wears a ruby necklace, the one-of-a-kind necklace worn by Carlotta in her portrait. 

"You shouldn't keep souvenirs from a murder, Judy!" Ferguson tells her, having dragged her back to the bell tower.  "You shouldn't have been that—sentimental!"

McPherson and Ferguson behave less than admirably, and feminist critics have noticed.  Film theorist Laura Mulvey has advanced the "Male Gaze Theory," which states that women in most movies are seen strictly through the eyes of heterosexual males, to the exclusion of other viewpoints.  Vertigo has been the subject of essays by Mulvey and others, propounding this theory.  (Laura can also be discussed in light of this theory, despite the testimony of Anne Treadwell and Bessie.)  We might deplore the treatment of Laura Hunt and Judy Barton—not to mention Madeleine Elster, Diane Redfern, Midge Wood, Carlotta Valdes—and we might not accept it in a film today.  But we can accept Laura and Vertigo for what they are: masterpieces that reflect the attitudes of another era and illuminate how we arrived at our own. 

The technical credits of Laura and Vertigo underscore the moods that Preminger and Hitchcock strove to create. The music of David Raksin in Laura and Bernard Herrmann in Vertigo is romantic, and both scores rank among the greatest in American cinema.  But Raksin's is plainly lush, whereas Herrmann's contains an edge of swooning desperation that underscores the emotions of Ferguson and Judy. 

Preminger's choice of black-and-white for Laura may have been dictated by his era, but Joseph LaShelle's photography (which won an Oscar) enhances the film immeasurably.  LaShelle's use of light and shadow—best represented by the scene of Waldo crouching on a staircase, preparing to finish the job on Laura—is a hallmark in the history of film noir.

Robert Burks' photography in Vertigo is as different from LaShelle's as it is possible to be—richly colored, nightmarish, almost hallucinatory.  There have been many articles and videos about Hitchcock and Burks' use of color of Vertigo, especially the color green.  In their hands, green becomes the color of passion, obsession, dreams, nightmares.  Madeleine/Judy is wearing an emerald-green stole when Ferguson first sees her; she drives a green Jaguar; Ferguson wears a green sweater in his apartment the night he saves Madeleine/Judy from the Bay; Judy is wearing a green dress when Ferguson first sees her on the street.  Above all, the neon sign outside Judy's window is a glaring, spectral green, saturating her tiny room and setting up what is, for my money, the greatest scene in any movie: Judy, fully transformed as Madeleine, walking slowly toward Ferguson as from out of a mist, a cherished ghost from his memory.

Both Laura and Vertigo have had their share of criticism for plot holes.  With Laura, these holes are mostly procedural.  How could Laura and Carpenter, dancing at a nightclub, not see Waldo sitting at the next table?  Laura's age is established as twenty-two, so how could she be an advertising executive of at least five years' standing, with a ritzy apartment and a housekeeper she has had for years?

With Vertigo, the problems are more fundamental.  Some critics have wondered how Elster could have been so sure that Ferguson was too acrophobic to climb the stairs to the bell tower.  That doesn't bother me much; I am more puzzled by how Elster and Judy got down from the bell tower without being noticed, and also how Elster could have been sure that Ferguson wouldn't look at the body.  (Also, Barbara Bel Geddes-- who was fourteen years younger than James Stewart--looks more like his daughter than his college classmate.) 

What can be said is that with Laura and Vertigo, the apparent mistakes are irrelevant.  Both films create insinuating moods that envelop audiences in their magic.  In the case of Vertigo, the magic seems literal.  Much has been written about the episode at the McKittrick Hotel, Carlotta's former mansion, to which Ferguson tails Madeleine/Judy.  He watches her go in, and he follows.  The hotel manager (Ellen Corby) identifies Madeleine/Judy as Carlotta Valdes, and confirms she has a room there, but insists she hasn't been in that day.  Ferguson demands to see her room, which is empty.

Ferguson looks out the window.  "Where's her car?" he asks.

"What car?" the manager answers.

Hitchcock always refused to explain this sequence, which adds to the supernatural aura of Vertigo.  So does the image of Joanne Genthon, the actress who modeled for the portrait of Carlotta.  Genthon's face, in black-and-white closeup, appears under the opening credits, and she also appears as Carlotta in the nightmare sequence.  Was Hitchcock suggesting that the spirit of Carlotta sought justice for her great-granddaughter Madeleine?  Or is Carlotta's presence merely a manifestation of Ferguson's derangement? 

Mark McPherson loved a woman he thought was dead; her appearance in the flesh is his salvation, just as his appearance is hers.  A shattered grandfather clock, the storage place for Waldo's shotgun, is the final image in Laura.  It marks the end of Waldo's influence over Laura, as well as the beginning of what Waldo calls "a disgustingly earthy relationship."

Scottie Ferguson is left staring down from the bell tower at Judy's corpse.  He loved a woman who never really existed and suffered her death twice.  He is cured of his acrophobia, but that hardly seems a victory.  Will Ferguson once again end up in a psychiatric ward?  Will he seek out Midge?  Will he hunt for Elster and bring him to justice?  Will he go to prison at the insistence of Henry Jones' coroner, who falsely accuses Ferguson of Judy's murder?  Those questions hang in the air at the end of Vertigo, the bell tolling as if to pose them.