Jonathan Rosenbaum on Otto Preminger (1995)
Otto Preminger with Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus,” 1960.
Like Erich von Stroheim, Preminger was born a Viennese Jew — but 20 years later and into a much higher economic bracket — and wound up playing the part of a Prussian sadist both on-screen and off. Stroheim, who kept his ethnic roots hidden, was more likely to vent his spleen at producers than at actors or assistants; but Preminger, who became his own producer, was the classic abusive dictator on his own sets. Anatomy of a Filmmaker — an interesting feature-length documentary about his career produced by his own family, hosted by Burgess Meredith, and recently released on video — devotes much of its space to exploring this issue. “I give ulcers, I don’t have them,” Preminger once told Peter Bogdanovich. I can vouch for the accuracy of this remark, having once spent a morning in the mid-70s watching Preminger shoot part of his penultimate feature, Rosebud, in Paris. However gracious he might have been to visiting journalists, he was hell on wheels to some of his employees.
Yet his films, for all their cynical and mordant undertones, are nearly always searching inquiries, almost never imposing foregone conclusions. Apparently the major source of his quarrels with actors was his refusal to give them motivations for their characters, an approach that often plays havoc with dramatic resolutions. But he preferred to keep alive the mystery of his characters’ personalities, to forestall any pat conclusions about them.
The first significant stretch of Preminger’s career was 1944 to 1952 — from Laura to Angel Face, with four other wonderful noirs in between (Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Thirteenth Letter). The second was roughly the first decade of his independence. There are interesting connections between these two periods — Bonjour Tristesse can be seen as a remake of Angel Face (my favorite Preminger noir), and Anatomy of a Murder, probably his best film altogether, refines some of the virtues of Laura. But the differences between Preminger as a contract director (mainly at Fox) and as an independent are equally striking. Liberated from the noirs and the (mainly Lubitsch-style) costume pictures of his stint at Fox, he gravitated more and more toward all-star blockbuster adaptations of best-sellers that became increasingly bloated. At their best they were grand and thoughtful entertainments; at their worst, the ambiguity typical of Preminger gave way to a sort of demographic calculation that bordered on Hollywood doublethink.
Sometime around the mid-60s, Preminger began to lose his rapport with the public, and he never fully regained it. Sadly, he suffered a major legal defeat around the same time that reversed his fortunes as a pioneering independent: after winning his battles with the Production Code over “risque” language in The Moon Is Blue and the taboo subject of heroin addiction in The Man With the Golden Arm, he tried unsuccessfully to sue Columbia Pictures and its TV subsidiary, Screen Gems, for granting him no control over the cuts and commercial interruptions made in TV showings of Anatomy of a Murder. (If he’d won, and thereby set a legal precedent, the last 30 years of American film history would have been markedly different.)
By the mid-60s his films had become even more personal, but the garish side of his earlier work tended to take over, with fascinating but often alienating results. The grotesque liberal pieties of Hurry Sundown and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon and the ugly extravagances of Skidoo (his hippie musical) and Such Good Friends were certainly distinctive and expressive, making these films prime cult material. But the general audience mainly stayed away, leaving it to hard-core enthusiasts (including me) to enthuse over such factoids as that Jackie Gleason’s LSD experience in Skidoo closely approximated Preminger’s own acid trip, for which Andy Warhol served as guide. [2011 afterword: This factoid, which I most likely encountered in the underground press during this period, apparently isn’t true; from more reliable sources, it appears that Timothy Leary was Preminger’s initial guide, although he chose to spend the latter part of his trip alone.] Then Rosebud, probably the nadir of his career, discouraged even us fans; and the touching sincerity of The Human Factor, his last film, which he financed with great difficulty, counted for virtually nothing.
A favorite among auteurists, Preminger has never registered as a meaningful stylist with the general public, even when his movies were popular, largely because he never stuck to the same kinds of pictures and always discussed social issues in his interviews rather than style or technique. Pauline Kael argued in 1963 that his very diversity was a flaw: “If Preminger shows stylistic consistency with subject matter as varied as Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent, then by any rational standards he should be attacked rather than elevated.” From the standpoint of conventional aesthetics, Kael has a point. But arguably Preminger, an investigator eager to pry into all sorts of material, changes some of the conventional rules by which we define success and failure, at least if we can join in the spirit of the search…
