Before Irvin Kershner went on to direct the “Star Wars” sequel “The Empire Strikes Back” he helmed the 1978 thriller “Eyes of Laura Mars” starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones. While moderately successful it occasionally does shows signs of wanting to be a better movie but it just never quite develops. It turns out being your typical big studio movie weighed down by too many cooks in the kitchen. So without further ado, let me ladle it out for ya.
The film opens up with an original song by Barbara Streisand and a negative image of someone's eyes. We then go to a classic Italian Giallo-style scene of a killer's gloved hand as he stalks a woman with an ice pick. He fingers through a photography book and stabs one of the photos in the eye. Then goes on to kill the woman in her apartment with you guessed it an ice pick through the eye. We then cut to another close-up of an eye, this time is is that of Laura Mars (Dunaway), a famous New York City fashion photographer in her high. Rise apartment. She is a successful single woman in the age of the women’s liberation movement. She has a gallery opening to celebrate her new book “Eyes of Mars”, the same book the killer was looking through. Her work is considered very controversial as it incorporates sex and violence in ads to sell clothing. They scratch the surface of the issues of sex, violence, and commercialism as well as the divide between models and “real” people but never go into depth with any of it. Laura then casually runs into skeptic John Neville (Jones) at the party and later we find out that he is a detective.
As the murders start to heat up so does Laura and Neville's affair and you can kind of see where this is going. Laura’s visions are increasing and after Donald is killed, Tommy becomes the prime suspect until he is gunned down but some trigger happy cops after an interrogation. With everybody thinking the killer is now dead Laura comes face to face with the real psychopath, Detective John Neville. We discover this when she sees herself in one of her visions, and Neville is standing in front of her. He, of course, has a split personality. After some fighting his good side re-emerges and pleads with her to shoot him and end all of this death and misery, so she does. We bookend the movie with Barbara Streisand again and a freeze frame of Laura dissolving into a black and white negative image.
“Eyes of Laura Mars” is by no means a great movie, but it's entertaining to a point. It really doesn’t have a firm identity other than your basic thriller. It has a number of murders, but it’s not gory, with barely a trace of blood. For its time it had a number of A-list actors and a large budget of around seven million. It just felt overly produced and a typical product of the large studio, but if you're feeling nostalgic for the late 70s this will be something you can eat up.