Waldo Lydecker, Shelby Carpenter, “Laura”, 1944.
Vincent, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Judith Anderson, and Clifton Webb in Otto Preminger’s film noir classic Laura (1944). Vinnie’s personal favorite.
William Castle’s 2nd directorial effort (following the failure of his 1943 film The Chance Of A Lifetime) was The Whistler based on the popular radio program. As a contract director for Columbia, Castle would go on to direct 3 more films in the popular Whistler series.
Vincent Price on Laura’s Shelby Carpenter :
“I loved him. He was a wonderful character-a real upper-class scum! He was really elegant. Everything about him was charming, but he was a schmuck. He was a terrible man and he was such fun to play because he didn’t know that. Most villains don’t know they’re villains at all.”
Vincent Price on Laura
From the lecture “The Villains Still Pursue Me”
“Every actor longs to be in a classic film - a film that is so well made, so well acted, directed, photographed, written, everything, it remains a classic. And one of those films that I was in, and I’m proud of it, was Laura….There were five of us in this picture. And when we were all sent the script, we all knew each other very well. And we all called each other and said, ‘Darling! Isn’t it wonderful? We’re going to be in this wonderful picture together. Isn’t it marvelous? And we’re going to be with this darling director.’ It was repulsive. So we got to the studio, and indeed it was all darling. It was absolutely wonderful. The script was marvelous, the cameraman was marvelous, the director was wonderful, we were wonderful. And finally, after we’d been going it for about a month, we got a call saying everything had been scrapped. And we said, ‘But it was so darling!’ We were starting all over again. We had a new cameraman, we had a new director. And we all started to work, and we all loved each other. We loved the script, we loved the new cameraman. We liked Otto Preminger (replacing Rouben Mamoulian as director).And finally the picture was finished. We all went to see it together. It was extraordinary. It was ostensibly the same picture we had done with the other director, but there was something added. Otto had imbued every single character in this play with an underlying evil. The other director had no knowledge of that, and we had played sort of surface characters.”
