THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Frank Sinatra and Eleanor Parker are not among my favorite film stars; normally, both are emotionally thin, morose, depressive—in Sinatra’s case, even in romantic musical-comedies. But, giving their finest, most compelling performances, they are terrific as Frankie and Zosch Machine, the newly ex-con/struggling ex-druggie and his wheelchair-bound manipulative wife, in separate quarters in a southside Chicago tenement, in The Man with the Golden Arm, from Nelson Algren’s novel. How did these actors come to be so good here? Two words: Otto Preminger. The flamboyant producer-director, who challenged Hollywood’s straight-laced production code by dramatizing a poker dealer in the throes of renewed heroin addiction, gave sensitive attention to his cast, drawing fine performances, additionally, from Darren McGavin as pusher Louie Fomorowski, Robert Strauss as gambling boss Schwiefka and, above all, Arnold Stang as tragicomic Sparrow, who loyally cleves to Frankie, whom he hero-worships, and who explains to the police, “You know, I don’t have all my marbles.” Alas, Preminger could do nothing with Kim Novak, the insipid actress who plays fastidious b-girl Molly Novotny, who also is loyal to her Frankie, who now dreams of being a jazz band drummer. Understandably, Zosch dismisses Molly as a “tramp.”

Preminger is at his best conjuring the seedy atmosphere of this black-and-white film (which Algren, incidentally, hated); it is a twisted nerve jangling a sordid environment. The studio-bound sets serve the interests of Preminger’s brilliant mise-en-scène: crummy rooms from which the oxygen seems to have been sucked out. An inevitable murder is inevitably ascribed to Frankie, who is tossed like scrap newspaper in concentric circles of hell. Is any exit possible, any freedom, up ahead?

Sam Leavitt, who would win an Oscar for another black-and-white film, The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), cinematographed evocatively.

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PORGY AND BESS (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Rouben Mamoulian must have hated Otto Preminger. Producer Preminger fired director Mamoulian from Laura (1944) and took over the direction himself. Fifteen years later, producer Samuel Goldwyn fired Mamoulian from Porgy and Bess and substituted Preminger. Mamoulian had directed the original 1935 stage production of George and Ira Gershwin’s folk opera. The film, which has become legendary for only rarely surfacing, has been suppressed by the Gershwin family, and it is easy to see why. In 1912 Catfish Row, a teeming black fishing village echoing Cabbage Row in Charleston, South Carolina, is unrecognizably neat; the two lead characters, the raggedy, crippled beggar Porgy and the prostitute Bess, have been scrubbed and sanitized. Goldwyn has Disnetized Porgy and Bess; he fired Mamoulian for wanting to keep the richer, darker colors in.
     None of this means that Preminger made a disgraceful film; but, following his producer’s lead, he made a disappointing one. It is moody, striking and, of course, melodious; but it feels like patchwork, and its impression of power depends on the intermittent rise in volume. It’s a production, a pastiche of scenes, a curiosity.
     Although both are dubbed when they pretend to sing, Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge play Porgy and Bess; both are faintly ridiculous. Brock Peters is a one-dimensional brute as Crown, Bess’s man before he kills, the law takes after him, and he takes to hiding. By way of compensation, there is at least theatrical life to Sammy Davis, Jr.’s pimp Sportin’ Life, who keeps jerking Bess on an invisible string of “angel dust,” and Pearl Bailey’s shopkeeper Maria, which revives our old, warm feelings for the incomparable Pearlie Mae.
     Years of neglect have faded prints of the film; but it was a weak concept of the show to begin with.

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WHIRLPOOL (Otto Preminger, 1949)

Like Laura (1944), which it continually references, Otto Preminger’s subsequent Whirlpool may be partly or entirely a dream. Kristin Thompson alerted us that the living Laura Hunt’s return to her apartment after McPherson dozes off in the room with her gigantic portrait could be the police detective’s wishful dream inasmuch as he has fallen in love with “her” in the course of investigating (what we at least initially presume to be) her homicide. The same beautiful woman, J.F.K.’s Gene Tierney, plays Ann Sutton, who spends much of Whirlpool in a trance, the patient of a villainous hypnotist, David Korvo (José Ferrer, going the whole hog), who she thinks is doing nothing more than helping her fall asleep. Ann is arrested by the police for the murder of Theresa Randolph (Barbara O’Neill, terrific), Korvo’s former mistress and patient, and until Korvo’s strangling her the patient of psychoanalyst Bill Sutton (Richard Conte, likeable for a change), Ann’s husband. At one point Ann shouts out in misery, “I’m dreaming all this!”
     Lt. Colton convinces Bill that Ann has been having an affair with Korvo, thereby delaying Bill’s understanding of his wife’s behavior—his professional territory; when he does “get” what has really been happening, and why, he tells Ann, “You’re someone I’ve injured by being blind.” But Colton also has been blind in “seeing” Ann as the killer—this, the result of Korvo’s alibi involving his operation for removal of his gall bladder; Colton’s wife recently died during identical surgery. The mystery solved, Colton informs Bill that Ann will be released in the film’s closing line: “It’s nice to have a wife come home to you.” A framed photograph of his wife right by his bed, Colton may dream her back into his arms one of these nights.
     Incredibly, some fault the script (by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, from Guy Endore’s novel Methinks the Lady), finding unbelievable these two cases of “blindness,” when of course the whole point is that personal biases interfere with both men’s objective judgment. Such carping reviewers also fail to take into account the film’s (brilliant) stylistic dreaminess.
     Much of this dreaminess hangs on Ann’s hypnotic trance, her seeming sleepwalking amidst night’s darkness and shadows, and all the reminders of Laura hanging about, including the looming portrait of Theresa in Theresa’s home and, at the last, Korvo’s farewell gunshot and a shattered phonograph recording of Theresa’s yet living voice, which hauntingly echoes Waldo Lydecker’s prerecorded voice playing on the radio as he is about to die in Laura’s apartment.
     For me, the most poignant line in Whirlpool comes when Ann tells Bill, “I wish I could help you,” when it is she who most needs his help—and, perhaps more to the point, her own.

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BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (Otto Preminger, 1965)

Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing is a brilliant mystery and a piercing study of twisted family relations.
     Single mother Ann Lake has just moved from Boston to London with the help of her brother, Steven, a reporter; when Ann goes to a private school to retrieve her 4-year-old daughter, Bunny cannot be found, nor does anyone admit remembering her. Meanwhile, the child’s passport, clothes and toys have all been removed from the apartment into which Ann has just moved that morning. We ourselves watched Ann unpack Bunny’s things; but we have not seen Bunny. “Bunny,” it turns out, was the name that Ann had given her imaginary playmate in childhood, and the police detective leading the investigation, Superintendent Newhouse, cannot quite conceal doubts of Bunny Lake’s existence.
     Some have charged Preminger’s film with “red herrings.” There are none. Preminger provides no false clues to mislead us. In Bunny Lake what we have instead is the criminal tossing about red herrings to mislead others, including the police, and by which, if only we are attentive, we are better able to solve the mystery. This film plays fair. Indeed, at the outset we see Uncle Steven pick up Bunny’s doll outdoors—a doll they put in for repair.
     The list of suspects, incidentally, includes Ann’s lascivious landlord, Horatio (Noel Coward), and the school’s reclusive retired co-founder (Martita Hunt, who played Miss Havisham in Lean’s Great Expectations, 1946). Laurence Olivier is seamless as Newhouse, who silently battles his prejudices to be professional and thorough. Moreover, Carol Lynley—whose Ann refers to her two Bostonian roles in Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963)—is intriguingly stylized, wonderfully resourceful.
     Preminger’s intricate, absorbing mise-en-scène is largely recorded in long-shots. Infinitely gray, Denys Coop’s black-and-white cinematography suits Preminger’s theme of ambiguity.

THE CARDINAL (Otto Preminger, 1963)

Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s dictum “Not deep the poet sees, but wide” can be applied to Otto Preminger’s post-Fox films, especially his widescreen dramatic extravaganzas. Those who cannot take Preminger seriously and those who reject Arnold’s remark probably largely coincide. I love Exodus (1960), In Harm’s Way (1965) and, in between, The Cardinal, from Henry Morton Robinson’s popular novel.
     The lamest part of liberal Preminger’s The Cardinal, a dark, reflective, engrossing chronicle of a Boston priest’s circuitous rise to becoming a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, is the one addressing anti-black hatred in the deep south and the terrorism inflicted by the Ku Klux Klan. This long segment in the three-hour film is preposterous. But, hey, at least the hooded boys aren’t whipping Ginger Rogers in the dark (Storm Warning, Stuart Heisler, 1951). Hollywood has often gone silly when addressing this vicious pack of white dogs. Recall Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming et al., 1939) on the subject?—and, before that, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915)?
     But Preminger more than makes up for his messy attempt here to grapple with American racial bigotry by the austerity, clarity and immaculate power of the film’s segment dealing with Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria, to which cause Cardinal Innitzer, charmed by the dictator, throws in the weight of the Church. Jewish, Preminger amasses a terrifying portrait of rampaging Nazi hooliganism.
     Stephen Fermoyle’s mind wanders into flashbacks during the ceremony ordaining him cardinal. Fermoyle is especially haunted by his dogmatic posture as priest when his sister’s life was at stake in childbirth. He bears the memory of a tragic mistake.
     Preminger’s calm, “objective” tone throughout, ironically, helps secure our emotional engagement as the poet-filmmaker surveys world history and the history of a human heart.

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