![]() Webb’s confidence in the film, however, is ebullient. In the novel, Waldo is fat from his indulgence in fine cuisine, and his physique is compared to McPherson and Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s intended, in a way that makes his inferiority seem too great a hurdle to overcome even in the duality between riches/poverty and brains/brawn that Waldo and Shelby represent as competing forces. The audience’s own interest in him absolves Laura for not seeing his faults more clearly. ![]() He is at once loathsome and entertaining, pathetic and controlling. In the film, Webb sparkles with the acerbic wit of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. Instead, it was the cultured essayist Waldo Lydecker that proved too difficult to break from Clifton Webb’s 1944 performance. ![]() It was not the eponymous heroine, nor Detective Mark McPherson, that I had trouble revising when I began Caspary’s novel, (perhaps because in the film McPherson is a close-lipped, hard-boiled type, and Laura seems ephemeral, and changeful, a point emphasized by her adapting to each man she is with). Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker and Dana Andrews as Detective McPherson ![]()
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