1944 / 88 min / b/w

Dir. Otto Preminger / Scr. Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt, Ring Lardner Jr.

Cast: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price

Paris release: July 13, 1946

Adapted from: Ring Twice for Laura (1942) by Vera Caspary

35mm print courtesy of Criterion Pictures

This screening was part of The Inaugural Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Paris 1946 and American Film Noir

Programmed by Rob King, Film and Media Studies

Watch trailer here →

"It was with some surprise, a few years back, that older Parisians learned the recipe for light comedy from Hollywood. It is with the same surprise that we now learn from the same American filmmakers how to apply an intellectual approach to so-called commercial filmmaking and the possibility of an 'interior' treatment of a subject. […]

In preference to other productions, Laura probably counts more in support of this theory than examples from the works of Orson Welles or Preston Sturges, because the intellectualism of these is obvious, by virtue of the very way in which they choose and treat their stories. But Laura is a simple detective story. [...]  

Leave it to others to establish whether the crime novel is becoming a new form of the novel tout court, and whether it will be thanks to cinema, rather than the pen of a Bernanos or a Huxley, that crime fiction will acquire its titles of nobility. We simply start from the fact that Hollywood writers and directors have chosen this most popular literary genre as the vehicle for a minor cinematographic and intellectual revolution."

– Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Amable Jameson, “Laura by Otto Preminger,” La Revue du cinéma, November 1946

About the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival

Paris 1946. The war is over and American films are once again in Parisian theaters. The French immediately notice a shift in the sensibility of Hollywood’s crime films. They call it noir.

This festival—the first in a ten-year series devoted to the legacy of film noir—returns us to that pivotal moment in film history some seven decades ago. For its inaugural year, the Kit Film Noir Festival will present eight of the films that screened in France that season and inspired the label film noir. Most films will be shown in 35mm.

This festival was funded by a generous gift from alumnus Gordon Kit (Columbia College ’76), in honor of his parents. 

For more information, contact filmnoir@columbia.edu