Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

Lately, fashion photographer with aspirations towards art Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), has been running on fumes. It’s no wonder, since her latest and controversial period of work – consisting of tacky and slick “tasteful” sex and violence photos that were in reality shot by the inexplicably respected Helmut Newton – is inspired by visions and nightmares, in which, as she will soon enough learn, sees actual crimes she then feels drawn to restage in her photos. Now, things are getting worse for her when she starts to witness murders apparently live through the Vaseline-smeared eyes of a killer; most of these victims will belong to her associates and hangers-on.

Even before she goes and tells the cops of her visions, the relation to her earlier photos and actual crimes scenes has drawn the interest of one Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones). Neville is understandably sceptical of Laura’s tales of telepathy, as well as of her art, but he is also clearly smitten by her. Plus, given the identity of the new batch of victims, it stands to reason the killer is someone from her entourage too. And really, there are some good candidates there, like her irascible manager/assistant Donald (René Auberjonois), her driver Tommy (Brad Dourif) with his criminal record, and her sleazy parasite of an ex-husband (Raúl Juliá).

Today, Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars is mostly, if at all, mentioned as a footnote in the career of John Carpenter, who wrote the original treatment and script, and then got his first taste of the Hollywood rewriting machine, leaving him typically disgruntled. Given most of Carpenter’s work, I don’t think he’s responsible for the badly dragging middle part of the film that tries to distract the audience from the near total absence of any actual plot development by adding a few more murders.

The film’s not all dragging middle, though, and the first and last act both seem to put this plainly into the realm of American thrillers trying to adopt elements of the giallo. The setting at the borders between fashion industry and art world and the instant glamour this theoretically provides – in practice Mars’s work is ass-ugly – is very typical, as is the film’s focus on visual aesthetics as a way to clue an audience in on characters and theme through mood instead of narrative motion, an approach the more mainstream areas of US genre cinema are often not terribly comfortable with. There are certainly some good moments in this regard in the film - particularly the repeated use of mirror motifs is very effective not just visually but also thematically in its blurring of the line between the seen and the seeing. It also repeatedly suggests the very specific mental illness the killer will turn out to suffer from without clueing this so hard as to be too obvious. Still, the film is never quite consistent in this approach, wavering between Italian stylization and late 70s US grubbiness in rather unproductive ways.

The fine cast are also doing their best to play through and around the often very bland dialogue (the romance scenes between Dunaway and Jones, though for once actually necessary for the narrative to work, are a particularly egregious example), and sinking their teeth into the film’s grittier moments.


Eyes of Laura Mars simply doesn’t come quite together as a movie, not ending up as any real disappointment but promising more than it can actually deliver.