“The world we are shown is cool, sunlit, or filled with the soft light of standard lamps: a world of apartments in the highest brackets of New York. But the characters cast their own shadows: Waldo Lydecker, played expertly by Clifton Webb, is a brittle jealous killer behind the front of a Woollcott-like columnist; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) is a parasite feeding on rich women; his mistress (Judith Anderson) is a purchaser of male flesh. Only Laura herself, played as the Eternal Woman by Gene Tierney, remains beyond reach of the mire. Preminger's direction, calm and detached, and Jay Dratler's and Samuel Hoffenstein's sophisticated dialogue, turn the women's magazine conventions of the story inside out, so that at the end we are given a portrait of the utmost corrosiveness.”