Quote of the Day: “Broadvay? I must tell ze birds!”

 

Sotto voce: quietly, under one’s breath, in a whisper.

Otto voce: very very loudly, at the top of one’s lungs, screaming purple-faced with forehead veins standing out like an orgy of earthworms.

‘And I directed Margin for Error by Claire Booth Luce, which opened on November 3, 1939. I remember the date because a German actor called Rudolph Forster was to play a German count — he was a great star in Germany. (Much later he played a small part in THE CARDINAL.) One day I came to rehearsals and he wasn’t there. In the middle of rehearsals, just a week before we were to open out-of-town, he had left, writing a very funny note for me: “Dear Otto, I am leaving to rejoin Adolf. Love, Rudolf.”

‘… We couldn’t find anybody to play the part, so Claire Booth Luce suggested that I play it. She had watched me when I rehearsed the actors and she said I could very well play a nazi.’

~ from The Cinema of Otto Preminger, by Gerald Pratley.

I was initially puzzled that Otto would re-hire Forster after being left in the lurch like that, and for such a dubious reason! Then I reflected that a) Preminger was perhaps grateful for the incident that sparked his acting career, a useful sideline, and b) Preminger must have been aware that working for him was NO TREAT, and this was perhaps his oportunity at long last to scream his head off at Forster, twenty years after the original offense.

Anyhow, Otto’s nazi was well-received, even garnering praise from Albert Einstein (great physicist, but was he a good judge of theatre?).

The play later became a film, which Otto directed, relaunching his stalled film career, with uncredited script work by Sam Fuller, still in uniform at the time – it’s arguably the first film Otto really put his heart and soul into, and it’s NOW AVAILABLE.