In case you just tuned in, I’m using Louella Parsons’ May 15, 1944, item on Rouben Mamoulian being removed as the director of “Laura” to take a long and meandering look at the making of the film. In examining Caspary’s career prior to “Laura,” we have found that by the 1930s, she had been the ghostwriter of a correspondence course on writing films, and had done a couple of novels and several plays, one of which, “Blind Mice,” was made into the 1931 film “Working Girls”
In her autobiography, “The Secrets of Grown-Ups,” she brags that between 1932 and 1938 she sold eight versions of the same story (“Suburb”) to the studios before Paramount told her to knock it off, all of them involving some permutation of what she called “a murder story without a murder.” As we will see in this post — and with the last of the films, “Scandal Street,” (1938) — this isn’t always true, but that’s how she described them.
We previously looked at the 1932 film “The Night of June 13,” based on the root story “Suburb,” and in the next post, we will next look at “Such Women Are Dangerous,” (released in June 1934).
The Making of “Laura” Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII
Above, Officer Henry W. Marden in an image taken from the group photo. At right, Marden in a photo dated 1889, courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Museum.
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