Dana Andrews

Dana Andrews played the detective Mark McPherson in Otto Preminger's Laura, made from Vera Caspary's novel: a policeman investigating the murder of Laura Hunt who grows steadily more fixated on the dead woman, returns to her flat to go through her belongings again, and in the end finds the real killer. Two years on he took the air force captain Fred Derry in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, adapted from MacKinlay Kantor, one of three servicemen who meet on the plane home to Boone City at the end of the Second World War. Fred comes from the wrong side of that town, had been a soda jerk before the war, and returns to the shack where his kind but alcoholic father lives with his stepmother.