Sometimes you just want to grab a shot, isolate it, and hold it up to the light. A walk, a mermaid dress, an elegant camera move. In this case, for some reason the soundtrack refused to come with it, so we have to do without.
The first time I watched THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM I was bothered by the unconvincing, claustrophobic sets. This time round, I had the experience of having been to New York and the production design seemed to capture something authentic about the place — perhaps that very enclosed feeling. Though director Otto Preminger would abandon the studio, pretty much (that last scene in THE HUMAN FACTOR seems to violate his locations-only rule about as brazenly as you could wish for), his earlier films do make sensational use of the ability to film interior and exterior in the same shot, something that’s tricky out in the real world unless you have very bright lights to make the stuff indoors almost as bright as the stuff outdoors.
Title sequences by Saul Bass. It’s interesting that Otto Preminger, something of a control freak one might think, was happy to basically hand over the openings of his movies to somebody else to direct. I mean, no doubt Bass and Preminger discussed these sequences intensively. But they still smack of untrammelled creativity, so it would be astonishing to me if Otto interfered much after the concept was agreed.
But then, Otto was also able to collaborate effectively with some great composers, and of course there again the filmmaker must entrust a large part of the movie to somebody else, somebody who cannot be directed in quite the same way as an actor or cinematographer…
SAINT JOAN. Impressive how Bass’s hip work merges so well with the period flavour.
BONJOUR TRISTESSE.
ANATOMY OF A MURDER. A classic.
EXODUS. “Otto, let my people go!”
ADVISE AND CONSENT.
“When the Saul Bass credits conclude with the dome of the Capitol lifting to reveal Preminger’s name, the limitations of the whole enterprise are already apparent.” ~ Jonathan Rosenbaum.
THE CARDINAL. Again, simple but stunning due to the careful design of action and lettering together.
IN HARM’S WAY. Just the placement of the words over the image is beautiful, it makes it inexplicable why so many title sequences don’t seem to bother with composition at all.
BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING. Probably my favourite late Preminger, of those I’ve been able to see in decent form. The best ever Olivier film performance, and a superb turn from Noel Coward.
THE HUMAN FACTOR.
Preminger, a useful combination of artist and huckster, undoubtably borrowed from Hitchcock’s zesty promotional gimmickry, pushing himself forward as a personality, as a bigger star than those in his films, and even narrating his own movie trailers in a lugubrious fashion (Hitch was way better at that though). But Preminger was the first to use the iconic Saul Bass as titles designer (unity was achieved by having Bass design ALL the publicity material as well).
I wonder if Otto Preminger died, of Altzheimer’s and lung cancer, mouthing the word “Rosebud”? Unlikely, I guess. But ROSEBUD, his second-last film, is the one where his critical rep really bottomed out, and it must have stung. If the ailing Preminger could remember anything from recent years, that failure might be it.
Although I’ve yet to experience ROSEBUD, I must admit I found his follow-up, THE HUMAN FACTOR, released four years later, pretty grim — Otto was reportedly already losing the plot, and it’s easy for me to believe. The volcanic Nicol Williamson seems miscast, and the model (and current Mrs. Bowie) Iman gives a performance of extraordinary awkwardness and painful self-consciousness (she’s rather good in STAR TREK VI, though, smoking a cheroot and battling Bill Shatner). Otto could still move the camera gracefully through the barren locations, though one wishes he wasn’t saddled with such an unconvincing studio Moscow for the film’s despairing conclusion. Graham Greene, who wrote the (rather unsatisfying) book, advised Preminger not to attempt the film, which he felt was too subtle for Otto’s temperament, or something. He also remarked afterwards that the film was plagued by budgetary difficulties.
(Despite all of the above, THF has an odd kind of pathos, mainly because it’s so thin-looking, so uncomfortable with its own shabbiness, like a terribly old person trying to cover their nakedness. You don’t want to look, but sorrow somehow forces you.)
No such issues seem to have beset the glossy multinational hostage drama ROSEBUD. The problem here may be more one of intrinsic naffnessin the plot: Palestinian terrorists hijack a yacht containing five naked young millionaires’ daughters, played by Debra Berger, Brigitte Ariel, Lalla Ward (future wife of Dr Who Tom Baker, and now of God-bashing evolutionary scientist Professor Richard Dawkins), Isabelle Huppert and Kim Cattrall.
Choke!
Peter O’Toole is clearly the man to rescue these damsels, and Lord Attenborough turns up also, as somebody called Edward Sloat, which is enough to make me want to see this film VERY BADLY. Naked millionaires’ daughters + Edward Sloat = Shadowplay Must-See.
Cattrall had a rough time with Otto and his ROSEBUD. “Rosedud , we called it,” she told the Guardian in 2002. “I was 17 [Preminger was 69], I hadn’t seen THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, or LAURA, or any of those films, and I didn’t realise what an innovative, brilliant film-maker Preminger was. All I knew was that he was very, very important, and he seemed to be screaming and yelling all the time. There’s a film called GULAG 17 [actually STALAG 17], which he was in, playing a Nazi commandant – and I felt like we were really living it.” Cattrall provoked some of this screaming by laughing whenever Otto called ”Action!”
“Well, I thought that was really funny. I thought they only ever said that in films made about films. I thought in real films, they said something like, ‘When you’re ready.’”
Preminger retaliated by telling Kim, “You remind me of Marilyn Monroe. Not in looks, of course. In lack of talent.”
I always think any actor confronted with this kind of backchat from a director should reply, “Well, you probably shouldn’t have hired me, then.”
Dear me. Is Otto really trying to sell the film based on its VARIETY OF LOCATIONS? And isn’t he rather an awkward presence as voice-over man? I think I even prefer the guy who, as Ewen MacGregor puts it, “must spend all his time driving from one recording studio to another, swigging whisky and smoking cigars and gargling broken glass.”
But still — gotta see ROSEBUD.
This is a much better Otto trailer — it’s alternately LUDICROUS and SOPORIFIC, but the good bits are amazing, starting with Otto’s hilarious first appearance (intentionally hilarious, yes, but why?) , and perhaps climaxing in his hyping of Barbara “Goo-goo” Bouchet, ”a new face…und a new body.” Plus he sounds more and more like Arnie the longer he talks (and he seems to talk a looong time).
I might have to give IN HARM’S WAY another try sometime… I remember the Pearl Harbour stuff being really impressive, Preminger’s long-take aesthetic married to gigantic pyrotechnic effects– not much chance of a retake there. And the Saul Bass end titles are wonderful, of course, the Preminger credit immediately followed by a ‘tomic ‘splosion (I never said SUBTLE). But I didn’t get much out of the film otherwise. I find the older John Wayne a little hard to take, until THE SHOOTIST redeems everything.
I love Jonathan Rosenbaum’s piece on late Preminger in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. J-Ro might be more positive today, but he captures with some sympathy the sheer oddness of late Preminger: “Yet for all their hysterical indigestibility, they are candidly (and sometimes painfully) personal works: what is lost in craftsmanship is gained in lucidity, even if this lucidity is often the expression of an ambivalence that borders on the schizophrenic. … Thus the ambiguity beginning in LAURA ends in pure and simple contradiction: the blind viewer may say ‘comedy’, the deaf viewer may say ‘tragedy’, but the spectator will have to settle, like Preminger, for something else.”
That does go some way to describing the fascination of late Preminger, both the good films and the bad films (not that there’s universal agreement on which is which).
