“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,” the nasally columnist played by Clifton Webb begins in his voiceover of “Laura” (1944, not rated, based on the detective novel by Vera Casparay). “A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For with Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her.”

Why would you be put off of this sharp, mean, gripping, deadly love story? Well, it’s in black and white — because doesn’t color make “The Hangover: Part II, A 22-Year-Old’s Contemplation of the AA Meeting” so

much more vivid, relevant and deep?

The gorgeous female advertising powerhouse Laura (Gene Tierney) has been shot in the face in her foyer with a shotgun full of buckshot and we’re hearing about it from a weak Easterner who fancies himself king of the center of the world. It’s like having some small fish in a big pond bachelor uncle with a pinkie ring swan about, despairing of the death of Princess Diana.

“Pass me that bottle of Pamper shampoo, will you detective?”

Lydecker is that sort of an antiquated man, with an apartment bedecked in chandeliers, museum-quality art displays, a grandfather clock and an “office” that consists of a marble tub with a swing-out platform where he can perch his dainty typewriter. He is a columnist in the days where such an appelation meant wealth and fame — not writing for free on an unedited blog. It must be a tub of cold water; when a gum-chewing, stone-faced detective (Dana Andrews) shows up to question him, Lydecker says, “to overlook me (as a suspect) would have been a point of insult.”

As the detective, amazingly, allows Lydecker to follow him on his investigation, we flash back to when Laura came into his life. She was an advertising salesperson who made up for her soulless search for endorsements by being fresh-faced and charming. Waldo turns her away instantly, saying his lunch (he makes 50 cents per word!) is more important than her career. Unfortunately, he’s won over by her wide eyes and naivete, and attributes her subsequent rise to her “eager mind” and not her model-perfect looks. But when she becomes romantically involved with a tall, dumb lunk named Shelby, Lydecker becomes jealous. Motive for murder? Or was it Lydecker, upset that his protegee went for the dumb one?

Even if she was in advertising, the dead woman certainly had a supernatural beauty and draw — even to the the hard-boiled detective, who Lydecker accuses of dreaming of the woman being “by your side at the policeman’s ball, or in the bleachers or listening to the heroic story of how you got a silver shinbone.”

And then, Laura shows back up — and the whole plot is thrown into wonderful disarray. Who was the body? Perhaps it was some bimbo her hunk was cheating with. Either way, Laura is not the victimized dumb bunny, lying in a morgue and memorialized by a gauzy oil portrait over her fireplace, that we originally thought.

“At least it’s not a duckface, like her pals on Facebook.”

“My mother always listened sympathetically to my dreams of a career,” the resurrected Laura recalls, “and then taught me another recipe.”

It’s a fine, Shakespearian lovers’ mystery, one of the finest of its time. Waldo is defeated, the lovestruck lord in distress who had the whole thing wrong: “Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes within a dream.”

And it is Laura who is strong, cunning, conniving. Her back does not collapse in an embrace. She may be a falsely smiling ad girl hoping for a lunchtime endorsement, one who goes home to listen to syrupy instrumentals on the phonograph, but she can escape death under her own steam — and she does so without fleeing like a terrified victim into the woods. She merely sees the chess moves nine in advance and walks away, as though stepping on a train for a weekend vacation. It’s cold, and calculated, and slightly cockroach-like, but she lives to tell the tale.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.