A killer’s on the loose, stabbing people right in the peepers with an icepick, and the only person who can stop this madman is Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway). She, for reasons she neither understands nor appreciates, shares sight with the maniac when he goes about a-murdering in New York City, a witness forced to take a front-row seat as innocent people die screaming. Making a bad situation worse, each victim happens to be either a friend or a peer: The models she photographs, the publisher putting together a collection of her photography, the catty manager overseeing her career. She’s helpless to stop the slaughter, and literally blind to everything else in the heat of the moment.
What torture. What terror. What a movie. “Eyes of Laura Mars,” Irvin Kershner’s 1978 neo-noir-cum-giallo relic, currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, feels like a cousin to the cinema of Brian De Palma, having opened in theaters 6 years after “Sisters” and predated his lurid 1980s masterpieces (“Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Body Double”) by a minute; fittingly, the movie functions as a foil to criticisms aimed at De Palma’s work, particularly moldy conservative hand-wringing over his predilection toward the erotic and fondness for kink. “Eyes of Laura Mars” orbits the exact sort of art that De Palma’s been making for five decades and change: Violent, shocking images that are misogynistic at face value but reflect both social as well as cultural realities and exhibit a joy for the photographer’s craft. The only difference is that here, the artist is a woman.
“Eyes of Laura Mars” opens with an extreme close-up of, well, two eyes, each of which happens to belong to Laura Mars; the photo melts into a negative exposure as Barbara Streisand belts the movie’s love theme, “Prisoner,” in the background. (Streisand, in fact, was originally considered for the lead role but declined over the material; Dunaway stepped in to replace her, and allegedly spent the shoot in conflict with producer Jon Peters, who at the time was dating Streisand.) The sequence reads like an invocation, the moment where the spell connecting Laura to the unknown killer is cast. Once the theme fades out, Kershner puts his viewer in the killer’s perspective, filming first-person in an apartment owned by Doris Spenser (Meg Mundy), Laura’s editor, who meets her swift end immediately after appearing on screen.
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Doris’ death is put together with prototypical giallo language: A shot of her face, a cut to the weapon brandished in the killer’s gloved hands, stabbing in a downward arc. “Eyes of Laura Mars” then transitions to Laura’s bedroom, where she awakes from what she assumes is a nightmare, and Kershner introduces the picture’s most important element: Style. Laura sleeps on a plush mattress surrounded by floor-to-ceiling mirrors. She lives in an opulent high-rise dressed with a spartan design sense. Everything about her home and her life oozes sophistication. Even the muted sirens blaring from New York’s bowels can’t disrupt Laura’s cool, and that cool carries through every remaining frame in the film.
Laura’s new exhibit is under scrutiny by the culture police as “Eyes of Laura Mars” gets underway: Questions fly left and right about whether or not her work risks desensitizing patrons to real-life violence, though occasionally those questions are instead phrased as insulting comments. “I just want to ask her if she knows how really offensive her work is to women,” reporter Sheila Weissman (Marilyn Meyers) snarkily coos as Donald (the legendary René Auberjonois), Laura’s fashion photography aide-de-camp, ushers her into the gallery. The prodding continues against a pitch-black backdrop as if the walls of the museum have been taken away and all in attendance are held in the night’s embrace. If there’s a better way to open a movie about murder most foul and fashion most fierce, Kershner didn’t find it, but as first acts go, this is a good one.
From here the film eases into a pattern of POV kills, Laura’s meltdowns as she observes from afar, and the investigations of Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), the officer tasked with finding the killer; he isn’t an art critic, but he falls in the “Laura’s art is tasteless” camp, too, and eventually falls in love with her despite his contempt for her photography and his role in the case. But in 2020, there emerges new drama at the core of the narrative: Laura’s back and forth with Donald about the status of her latest shoot. It’s a big damn inconvenience to Donald that Laura’s visions render her incapable of photographing anything; he lets her know it, but she’s not having it. “Okay, you’re right. What are we, monsters?” Donald sulks aloud. “Let’s just wrap this thing, go home, cower in our caves, and wait for the killer to strike again!”
Mayor Vaughn stubbornly reopened Amity’s beaches only 4 years prior in “Jaws,” and today, he’s a reference point for the crooks and death cultists pushing to reopen America’s economy in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Donald, though pouting over profit on a far smaller scale, echoes the same sentiment: Who cares about mortal peril when there’s money at stake? The human cost of continuing the shoot counts less to Donald, at least at first, compared to the financial cost of putting business on hold. (Over time he makes up for being gutless and callous in a wonderful bit of cross-dressing chicanery on Laura’s behalf; Auberjonois is a hoot throughout “Eyes of Laura Mars,” but Donald’s final hour is his finest.)
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Kershner and the screenwriters—David Zelag Goodman and John Carpenter in his first outing on a major studio film—aren’t interested in the mechanics of capitalism, and “Eyes of Laura Mars” has little to say about greed at the expense of the greater good. But the movie’s accidental prescience, perhaps, points to an old constant: That when dollars are on the line, the parties trying to make them won’t hesitate to put their coffers ahead of others’ wellbeing. That’s not the reason to watch “Eyes of Laura Mars,” of course: It’s the aesthetics, the slick veneer, the atmosphere, the awesome power of Jones’ unibrow, the naughty psychosexual thrills. But the film takes on new meaning under duress from COVID-19; the sound of sirens might not bother Laura, but for those of us watching at home, they cut like razor wire.
