Bunny Lake Is Missing

Carol Lynley and Noel Coward in Bunny Lake Is Missing (dir. Otto Preminger, 1965).

Later Preminger piece in which a young woman's daughter goes missing--or is she simply imagining that she ever had a daughter in the first place? Visually very elegant. The acting is a mixed bag, and when it fails it's mostly the script's fault. For instance, there's the old absurdity wherein a character behaves more or less like a normal person until it is revealed that they are insane, at which point the character starts acting like a child, making the entire climax sort of daffy. Noel Coward is unbearably slimy. Lawrence Olivier gives a subtle, soothing performance as a police detective. There's a particularly creepy scene in a doll hospital. Footage of The Zombies (Rod Argent et al.) is inserted gratuitously here and there.

I heard this was going to be remade with Reese Witherspoon in the lead role, but then she pulled out. Not sure if the project is still on.

Advise & Consent

Charles Laughton floats up the senate steps in Advise & Consent (dir. Otto Preminger, 1962).

Otto Preminger's swooping, on-location, black-and-white elegancies play over the marbled surfaces of Washington, DC. The story is all big powerful men snarling and sniffing ever so articulately at each other, in that early sixties not quite subversive but mildly socially satirical in a purely structural way way. All the same, the fiction of national politicians speaking in full, eloquent paragraphs like ancient Romans is beguilingly attractive.

Laura

Clifton Webb and Dana Andrews in Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944).



Gene Tierney complements blossoms with puffs of smoke.



Dana Andrews stuck in his skin.

Preminger's most celebrated noir, and with good reason (though I'm personally attached to Where the Sidewalk Ends). Everything works: the visuals, the music, the dialogue all thrum together like an elegant sonata. If there's anything "wrong" with it, it may be that it's all so sparkly and debonair that it's too high-class for pure noir--but that's where Dana Andrews saves the day. As the cynical detective who gradually becomes obsessed with the beautiful dead woman in the painting, he brings a grimy shadiness to his part that cuts the glare of all the sophistication surrounding him.

Angel Face

Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum in Angel Face (dir. Otto Preminger, 1952).



"You can be so nice sometimes": Jean Simmons and Barbara O'Neil.



But not this time: Jean Simmons.

Otto Preminger shot Angel Face in eighteen days on a shoestring budget at Howard Hughes' behest, aided by cameraman Harry Stradling, writer Frank Nugent (best known for scripting John Ford westerns like Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers), and composer Dmitri Tiomkin. Typically for Hughes' productions, it was fraught with tensions and antipathies. Star Jean Simmons (Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet) did the film to satisfy a long, bitter contract entanglement with Hughes, and found herself terrorized for whatever reason by Preminger. Mitchum gallantly smacked Preminger in the face, Preminger tried to have him fired to no avail, Simmons cut her hair off and had to do the whole film in a wig, etc. etc. Preminger enlisted several writers in the task of salvaging the lame story supplied by Chester Erskine before entrusting the final repair work to Nugent (Ben Hecht was involved somewhere along the line). Out of all this comes a not-so-minor noir triumph. On the surface, it's a tired retread of a James Cain type of story about lovers enmeshed in murder, but several elements combine to lend it special distinction. Tiompkin's moody piano score is one. Preminger's and Stradling's achievement of visual sweep and scale by economical means is another. Mitchum's bored stare, par for the course in his Hughes pictures, here works nicely to play up the way in which he is defenselessly caught up in Simmons' psychosis, most of the time thinking he is in complete control. Most of all, however, Simmons radiates an intense, fatalistic gloominess, and invests her femme fatale character with an oversized sense of morality that is all the more poignant for being an inadequate and temporary development.

See also Paul M.'s post at Noir of the Week.

Whirlpool

José Ferrer goes eye to eye with himself in Whirlpool (dir. Otto Preminger, 1949).

Ben Hecht's screenplay for Whirlpool is so outrageously silly for the first part of the film that it's hard not to think he's going for parody (he shares credit with Andrew Solt, so I'm just guessing that he's responsible for some of the dialogue in question). At times, one thinks one is watching The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, for example when Gene Tierney tells her psychoanalyst husband that she wishes she were "brighter" so she could share his love of "science" with him. Some of this silliness actually gets contextualized by later plot developments, but there are still unaccountable moments of lunacy, as when Ferrer's shady hypnotist David Korvo meets Fortunio Bonanova at a high society party and publicly diagnoses him as a chronic depressive with violent tendencies, finally holding up his scarred wrist as proof of a recent suicide attempt--to Bonanova's awe and delight!

The usual Preminger pleasures are in place: the swooping camera, the rich chiaroscuro shadings, the gleaming tapestry of social elites and nefarious infiltrators. Only Ferrer is remarkable among the lead roles. Richard Conte's "gangster" accent (for so, alas, it cannot avoid being perceived in light of his other roles and the filmic conventions of the day) makes him fairly unbelievable as a world-famous psychiatrist. Gene Tierney, as so often, seems to sleepwalk through her part, and the fact that the script accommodates this quality only helps up to a point. It doesn't matter: the whole is a prime specimen of one of those midcentury pseudo-Freudian thrillers that are irresistible if you're into that sort of thing.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Bert Freed and Dana Andrews in Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950).

Dana Andrews exudes sourness and fatalism, but with an insolent grace that makes him possibly the quintessential noir leading man. (Am I right in my sudden realization that Steve Martin is primarily channeling Andrews in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, or do they both just have that rubbery shiftless walk and sneer?) In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Andrews' fallen cop Mark Dixon is so steeped in defeatism and desperation that his performance teeters on the edge of comedy--like when he opens a closet door, revealing to the audience, but not to his partner across the room, the body of the man he has just accidentally killed, saying with attempted nonchalance, "Nothing in there," before shutting the door again. Later, he snarls at a heavy: "I don't like it when rats grin at me."

You could probably count the number of cuts in the film on the teeth of your comb: Preminger and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle glide and linger through nearly each shot, using every inch of screen space to advance the story and explore character. Gene Tierney seems almost too glimmery and frail to exist in the same grimy world that Andrews represents, but they float around together well, like a couple of haunted fashion models (Andrews with his outstanding fedora, and Tierney with about a hundred outfits supplied by her husband Oleg Cassini, who makes a brief appearance as more or less himself). Gary Merrill plays a gangster whom Andrews attempts to frame: his indignation is hard not to sympathize with. Neville Brand, as an assistant goon, throws some wicked punches and seems even to be able to boss his boss around. Ruth Donnelly owns her brief scenes as a wisecracking restaurateur. Karl Malden lends some flair to a thankless role as the good cop with the wrong conviction. And Bert Freed fills his character with more depth and pathos than he has any right to, considering that he doesn't do much more than ride along with Andrews and glare disapprovingly at everything and everyone.

Fallen Angel

Venetian blinds out of control: Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell in Fallen Angel (dir. Otto Preminger, 1945).

Preminger's follow-up to Laura has all the ingredients of classic noir, including gorgeous cinematography, a powerful soundtrack, and some jaw-dropping circumventions of the Breen Censorship Office's rigid code (a spent-looking couple lying in the same bed, for example, a prolonged steamy kiss, and a clear instance of butt-grabbing). Dana Andrews is great as the unscrupulous drifter who comes up with a plan to marry an old maid (Alice Faye) and bilk her out of her inheritance so he can win over the true object of his desires, the hot 'n' slutty waitress Stella (Linda Darnell). There are excellent supporting performances from Anne Revere, Charles Bickford, John Carradine, Olin Holland, Percy Kilbride (Pa Kettle), Bruce Cabot (of King Kong fame), and an uncredited Dorothy Adams.



HOT, indeed.

The only thing, to my mind, that keeps this picture from attaining true top-of-the-line classic noir status is the plot resolution, which requires us to buy a substantial change of sentiments in the main character without much motivation, and--here I will try not to reveal anything specific--misses an opportunity for a much more compelling whodunnit payoff, which would also provide an antidote to the first problem.