This movie was made in the late 1970's and still is good. It also captures a type of celebrity that today's celebrities don't have. It was when photography was real and no photo-shop around, yeah there were airbrushes, but talent and marketing made a celebrity, not just marketing. It is one of Tommy Lee Jones' first major roles and he was great. It was one of Faye Dunaway's last great roles. The song by Barbara Streisand still is haunting and great today. One reason it wasn't as well received was due to the producer being Jon Peters who was back then known more for being Barbara's Boyfriend. But the script was written by John Carpenter.Among the film's other assets are all the time-capsule location shots in Manhattan, the now-quaint disco soundtrack, the Helmut Newton-style "photo session scenes", and a strong supporting cast which includes Tommy Lee Jones as a homicide detective who becomes romantically involved with the titular Miss Mars. The plot at times stretches believability to ludicrous heights, such as when Dunaway, "seeing" a murder in progress, drives a car through the streets of Manhattan, even though she's effectively blind, screaming "Donald!" before finally crashing through a show window (How did she manage all those turns? From memory?) But unintentional camp does not hurt "the Eyes of Laura Mars" one bit in fact, it just makes it all the more delicious!Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

The Seventies seemed to be a time for film makers to push the envelope by shocking viewers and challenging mainstream perceptions with stylized treatments of sex and violence. Other movies that come to mind are 1971's "Klute" and 1977's "Looking for Mr. Goodbar". I would even throw 1970's "Joe' into that mix with it's take on free love and nudity. What's kind of funny as I watched the picture today on cable, was that the exposed breasts of women in Laura Mars' photos were uncensored, but the ones on the live models were. What's the point of that? There's that other element that gets some treatment from the newspaper reporter in the story speculating on whether the gallery photo exhibit has a desensitizing effect on society, and might possibly be the cause of some deranged killer who gets inspired by the titillation of sex and violence together. There are those, primarily in the position of making these pictures, that think that's all hogwash, but why wouldn't a rational person make the same observation. Sometimes bad ideas get their start in a subliminal way.Anyway, this was a fair enough thriller. Trying to figure out the murderer in a murder mystery can often be a challenging exercise, but this film tried too hard to pin the crimes on Brad Dourif's character, so I had him dismissed right off. That John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) turned out to be the killer in Laura's visions wasn't a complete surprise, though the picture could have better explored at which point in his life Neville went completely off the rails. The confrontational scene in which Laura realizes in horror that John is a madman was handled well, I was patiently waiting for her to pull the trigger and she didn't let me down. Good job, Laura.

Jon Peters''The eyes of Laura Mars' symbolizes the moods & sty-lings of the 1970-s -- as much as Michelangelo Antonioni's famous 'Blow Up' does for the 1960-s.Consequently Laura Mars' lasting visuals outshine its story by far. Bright and dashing, glittering all around, these visuals strongly remind us of what the 1970-s really were about: sexual freedom unhampered by AIDS (which emerged as late as the 1980-s).However, I spot a significant difference with 'Blow Up'. Antonioni has his 1960-s visuals brilliantly supported by a half hidden and intriguing story. Unfortunately 'The eyes of Laura Mars' lacks such a refined extra value. Although not bad, this film's story reminds us of a mediocre police series on your television. It may even degrade its visual brilliance.Apart from its new & newly tolerated sexual freedom, there is not much left to tell about the 1970-s. So maybe Laura Mars' quality-gap between visuals and story may function to symbolize this remarkable era after all.

This film has always been a bit of an anomaly.When I first saw it as a kid I thought it was awful and wonderful. And today, it hits me exactly the same way.Yes, it's got a crass, urban-sleaze vibe a la the late-'70s, which is both its weakness and its strength.Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING and DRESSED TO KILL and CALIGULA and LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR all seem prime examples which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.And the period plays a key role in why they don't entirely work -- and yet why they DO work.The '70s had a melancholy, breezy, sexy thing going on which defined the decade, yet the last half of that decade also had an odd gutter-smarm undercurrent which is hard to describe but at the time was hard to miss... It wasn't the only era to give us real life serial sex murderers, but -- gee! -- no other era seemed to fit it so well.Movies tapped into this vibe as well. And if it was going to do so effectively, you had to wind up getting a bit queasy during or after watching it. And that was these films' strengths as well as their vulnerability to partly-valid criticism.Curiously, motion pictures can get much more explicit today, but few of them feel so utterly fetishistic as those from the late-'70s. These pictures were repellent in many ways, largely on purpose. But their sordid-beyond-belief flavor was absolutely part of the zeitgeist of the time. And I retained an interest in them without fully condoning them.They're period pieces, essentially. And valuable for that reason.And they sort of define that old, over-used idea that "it's so bad it's good." Ultimately, despite the elements that don't entirely work, the overall film just does.Film critic Janet Maslin said about it at the time, "...It's the cleverness of EYES that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, dryly controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip..." And George Lucas hired Irvin Kershner to direct THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on the strength of EYES OF LAURA MARS.