SCFZ poll: Otto Preminger

[flip]

Polling the films of director Otto Preminger

The rules:

- your list can include no more than half of the Preminger films you've seen, up to a maximum of 5. So if you've seen seven of his films, for example, you can list only a top 3. It's only if you've seen ten or more of his films than you can list the maximum of five.

- i'll assume ballots are ranked unless you tell me otherwise. unranked ballots are fine.

- deadline for ballots: next Tuesday, in seven days, whatever day that is

- if anyone is watching films for these polls, then i'll extend the deadline up to three days, if someone requests an extension

- next poll: whoever posts the first ballot in this thread is free to nominate the director we poll next, unless you've nominated in this round already (everyone should get a chance). Already nominated this round: greg x, wba, greennui, umbugbene, ofrene, mesnalty, john ryan

umbugbene created an index on letterboxd of all of our previous polls here: letterboxd.com/umbugbene/list/index-of-all-scfz-director-polls/

one rule for nominees: at least 3 scfzers need to have seen 10+ of a nominee's films, or at least 4 scfzers need to have seen at least 8 of the nom's films, so if it isn't clear if that will be the case, we'll confirm that's true before moving forward

if 24 hours pass after a poll opens, and no one eligible to nominate has posted a ballot, then i'll nominate someone, and then we'll start over, and everyone will be able to nominate again

[flip]

Where the Sidewalk Ends
Bunny Lake is Missing
Laura
Angel Face
Whirlpool

seen 11

[Silga]

Seen 4:

Laura
Anatomy of a Murder

Love these two films. Great masterpieces by Preminger.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Oh goodie, okay I'll finally watch Anatomy of a Murder for this and try to fit in some others. I'll save my votes for then. While inconsistent, I've always thought he's a really interesting director for the way he seemed to purposely become a one-director wrecking ball against the Production Code in the 1950s.

[Caracortada]

Seen 11. He's one of those directors of whom I've seen a lot of movies, without necessarily remembering that they were his.

1. Bonjour Tristesse
2. Bunny Lake Is Missing
3. The Human Factor
4. Anatomy of a Murder
5. Carmen Jones

[oscarwerner]

Seen 14. My votes go for:
1-Laura (1944)
2-The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
3-Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
4-Advise & Consent (1962)
5-Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

[wba]

I love him but have seen very few...

oh no, 4 personal favorites out of 5 films seen...

01. Angel Face (1953)
02. Laura (1944) - the film is even better than the novel

Preminger seen: 5

[flip]

I've always thought he's a really interesting director for the way he seemed to purposely become a one-director wrecking ball against the Production Code in the 1950s.

i need to see those films! i just watched rappaport's from the journals of jean seberg, in which some of preminger's 1950s films figured prominently, so i'm (even more) interested to see them now

[flip]

Seen 4:

you can pick our next director, silga!

[Silga]

Seen 4:

you can pick our next director, silga!

Maybe Walter Hill.

I've seen 16

[greennui]

7.

Daisy Kenyon
Bunny Lake Is Missing
Laura

[Curtis, baby]

Seen 11

Bunny lake is missing
Anatomy of a murder
Whirlpool
Where the sidewalk ends
River of no return

[oscarwerner]

I have 10+ of Walter Hill

[brian d]

seen 10

bunny lake is missing
river of no return
bonjour tristesse
anatomy of a murder
laura

just 3 by walter hill

[mesnalty]

Seen 6:

1. Anatomy of a Murder
2. Laura
3. Bunny Lake Is Missing

[MrCarmady]

Fuck yeah. Only seen 4 but he's dope, will use this as a push.

1. Anatomy of a Murder
2. Laura

[john ryan]

Seen 32. Daisy Kenyon sits in my top 10.

1. Daisy Kenyon
2. Anatomy of a Murder
3. Laura
4. Bonjour Tristesse
5. Fallen Angel

Where does the average cinephile sit on the ownership of A Royal Scandal? I really enjoy it, but I seem to remember reading it was more Lubitsch than Preminger.

seen 10+ Walter Hill

[therouxxx]

Laura
The Human Factor
Forever Amber
Where the Sidewalk Ends

hoping to see a couple more

[flip]

i've seen 15 walter hill, he definitely works, so i'll start that poll on friday!

[liquidnature]

Seen 10

1. Angel Face (1952)
2. Laura (1944)
3. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
4. Daisy Kenyon (1947)
5. Whirlpool (1949)

As evident by the number of films seen (for me), I really started getting into Preminger back in the day, after seeing and loving Angel Face and Laura. Angel Face may have one of the most shocking moments in all of cinema. It's the only thing I remember about the film to this day.

As to John Ryan's question regarding A Royal Scandal, I'd have to do more research, but if I recall correctly, it was primarily Lubitsch.

[liquidnature]

Andrew Sarris' write-up on Preminger from The American Cinema (1969)

Spoiler!

"Far Side of Paradise" refers to "the directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems."

Laura is Preminger's Citizen Kane, at least in the sense that Otto's detractors, like Orson's, have never permitted him to live it down. For his part, Preminger refuses to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the films he directed before Laura in 1944. There is admittedly a streak of Foxphorescent giddiness running through the frames of Under Your Spell (1936), Danger-Love at Work (1937), Margin for Error (1943), and In the Meantime, Darling (1944). However, Preminger is hardly unique in his disdain for the fruits of his early experience. Fred Zinnemann has never been eager to reminisce about Kid Glove Killer, Eyes in the Night, Little Mr. Jim, and My Brother Talks to Horses. George Stevens undoubtedly prefers to jump straight to Alice Adams without pausing for Cohens and Kellys in Trouble, Bachelor Bait, and Kentucky Kernels. Vincente Minnelli's mystique does not encompass I Dood It any more than Robert Aldrich boasts of The Big Leaguer, and Josef von Sternberg would probably prefer to forget his close-up of Grace Moore's tonsils in The King Steps Out.

There is no easy moral to draw from the evolution of Preminger's style since he left Fox in the early fifties to become his Own producer. Ironically, it was only when Preminger began blowing his own horn from The Moon Is Blue onward that his earliest films came into focus. His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer. Perhaps they subconsciously resent him for not ruining himself with the excesses of a creative folly. Culture heroes like Sternberg and Stroheim and Ophuls and Welles have acquired, rightly or wrongly, a legendary reputation for profligacy. Preminger's legend is that of the cosmic cost accountant, a ruthless creature who will mangle the muse for the sake of a shooting schedule.

The story is told in the trade of the day Preminger shot the Saint-Newman hilltop scene in Exodus. During the last take, the shadow of the boom fell across the couple. It was too late for a retake because the sun had gone. Preminger decided to let the shadow stand rather than return to the location the next day for a retake that would disrupt his shooting schedule. Some finicky aesthetes might write this decision off as sloppy craftsmanship, but for Preminger it is a question of survival. The fact is that he has not enjoyed a major critical and commercial success since Anatomy of a Murder in 1959. His frugality, and his frugality alone, has kept him from drowning in a sea of red ink. Almost alone of the new tribe of producer-directors, Preminger has accepted the responsibility of freedom, as well as the lesson of a shrinking market.

But what is the artistic point of all these crass production stories? Or as Dwight Macdonald might put it, what's art to Preminger or Preminger to art? Indeed, serious film criticism of Hollywood movies is always impaled upon the point that Holly-wood directors are not profoundly articulate about their alleged art. In this respect, Preminger is not a "good" interview. He will freely concede that more is read into his films by some critics than he consciously put there. He neither abuses his detractors nor embraces his defenders. He seems to enjoy the effect he creates with his outrageous personality, a personality that serves also as a mask. To read all sorts of poignant profundities in Preminger's inscrutable urbanity would seem to be the last word in idiocy, and yet there are moments in his films when the evidence on the screen is inconsistent with one's deepest instincts about the director as a man. It is at these moments that the serenity of his style seems to transcend the limitations of his sensibility.

It is ultimately Preminger's manner, rather than his matter, that should concern us most deeply. Otherwise, his extraordinary eclecticism in subject matter would make him a poor choice indeed for a career analysis. What is one to say of a taste in scripts oscillating between Oscar Wilde and Kathleen Winsor, Bernard Shaw and F. Hugh Herbert, Nelson Algren and Allen Drury, Françoise Sagan and Leon Uris? Thematic consistency is hardly Preminger's hobgoblin. The secret of his style is elsewhere. One critic has called it fairness, another the ambiguity of objectivity. Its technical correlative is the perversely objective camera viewpoint that keeps his characters in the same frame. Why does Preminger present his spectacle in this way? As he himself explains, he came from the theatre where he was accustomed to looking at drama as a spatial whole. Consequently, his deepest instincts are always opposed to montage. Without an in-bred instinct for cutting, he is not able to execute the movie gags for which Hollywood has developed an original cinematographic language. It follows almost logically that Preminger's projects, more often than not, have a solemn, somber quality. His melodramas at Fox, particularly Laura, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and his RKO loan-out, Angel Face, are all moodily fluid studies in perverse psychology rather than crackling suspense movies. The characters click even as the action falters. The reviewer in search of crackling melodrama would mark Preminger down as a failure in most of these films, possibly all except Laura. Even his comedies are too fluid to encompass the obligatory reaction shots. The Moon is Blue comes out being a little sad, and Bonjour Tristesse, far from being a merry Gallic romp, is transformed by Preminger's color/black-and-white duality into a tragedy of time and illusion.

Where Richard Brooks displays a tendency to transform art into trash, Preminger displays a tendency to transform trash into art. His most recent plots have been big, violent, and vulgar. Exodus, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, In Harm's Way, and Hurry Sundown are all derived from bloated novels on big subjects. Unfortunately, Preminger does not entirely transcend his material on any occasion. Nor does he reshape it sufficiently to his own taste. He is similarly passive with his players. John Wayne and Patricia Neal are as admirable in In Harm's Way as Paula Prentiss, Tom Tryon, and Patrick Neal are deplorable. For every John Huston in The Cardinal there is unfortunately a Lee J. Cobb in Exodus. Where Michael Caine and Jane Fonda are original creations in Hurry Sundown, Robert Hooks and Diahann Carroll degenerate into dull stereotypes. individual scenes can be magnificent—the prison raid in Exodus, the shipboard sequences with the President in Advise and Consent, the Viennese ballroom scene in The Cardinal, and the opening dance scene in In Harm's Way</o> invoking in one slowly moving shot the entire Glenn Millerish Zeitgeist of the forties. Too often, however, Preminger seems to destroy what he so lovingly creates. This is part of his ambiguity as an artist, a key perhaps to a cynicism far deeper and infinitely more destructive than Billy Wilder's.

Still, every Preminger film, even his most ill-fated, bears the signs of an overall conception and the stigmata of a personal attitude. If a Centennial Summer or a Porgy and Bess fails of execution, it is not because Preminger lacked a discernible approach toward these musicals, but rather because the various elements in the genre failed to coalesce in terms of the director's conception. By contrast, Carmen Jones succeeds on its own questionable terms as the Preminger musical par excellence—drab, austere, and completely depoeticized.

During his career Preminger has moved into direct competition or comparison with other directors. A Royal Scandal and The Fan pointed up Preminger's relationship to Lubitsch, as did obviously That Lady in Ermine, which Preminger finished after Lubitsch's death. Lubitsch is generally given the edge in these sectors and for good reasons. However, it is not entirely fair to Preminger to place him out of his time. As Lubitsch was the unobtrusive cutting of the twenties and thirties, Preminger is the camera movement and long takes of the fifties and sixties. if Lubitsch summed up his time, Preminger was ahead of it in his Fox period. The Lubitsch virtues have disappeared from the cinema, and we are the poorer for it, but Preminger anticipated the conditions that would cause their disappearance. The grace and precision of Lubitsch's sensibility seem out of place in a world consecrated to the most grotesque explosions of the ego. Preminger's impassive gaze—accepting the good with the bad, the beautiful with the ugly, the sublime with the mediocre—is both more appropriate and more merciful.

We are left with a director who has made at least four master-pieces of ambiguity and objectivity—Laura, Bonjour Tristesse, Advise and Consent, and Bunny Lake Is Missing, a director who sees all problems and issues as a single-take two-shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other, a representation of the right-wrong in all of us as our share of the human condition. In the middle of the conflict stands Otto Preminger, right-wrong, good-bad, and probably sincere-cynical.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Skidoo
Saint Joan
Bunny Lake Is Missing

Seen seven.

[Holymanm]

Anatomy of a Murder

Seen 4. Laura and Fallen Angel are two of the worst noirs I've seen, which is saying something. Carmen Jones is... a movie

[rischka]

the man with the golden arm
daisy kenyon
forever amber
laura
anatomy of a murder

i didn't get bunny lake at all lol/maybe i should try again

[ofrene]

seen 4
1. Laura
2. Anatomy of a Murder

Bunny Lake was little let down to me(maybe I anticipated it tooooooooo much...)

[nrh]

forever amber
daisy kenyon
anatomy of a murder
bunny lake is missing
bonjeur tristesse

should watch/rewatch a bunch. very much recommend the fujiwara book on his films, which you can usually find for a few bucks used; i don't think his reading is as convincing as his books on j. tourneur or jerry lewis (which are genuine great books) but the history especially is fascinating.

[Umbugbene]

Seen 18

1. Bunny Lake Is Missing
2. Advise & Consent
3. Laura
4. Skidoo
5. Carmen Jones

Love Bunny Lake for the plot most of all, but it also has so many great supporting performances: Noel Coward, Martita Hunt, Laurence Olivier, Keir Dullea, & Finlay Currie.

[...]

Advise and Consent
In Harm's Way
Angel Face
Daisy Kenyon
The Cardinal

[MrCarmady]

Considering Fallen Angel's reputation, I was a little surprised it didn't get any love here, that is until I watched it. It has some nice dialogue, performances, and visuals, but never quite knows what to do in terms of narrative and character development and comes off as uneven and rushed. Shame, because the opening 20 minutes or so had me quite excited.

[liquidnature]

The 13th Letter (1951)

With the poor picture quality and substantial dead air, felt more like a b-noir than something from Preminger with a big studio, but I actually really enjoyed this, despite it only making me want to watch Le Corbeau the whole time. Haven't seen the latter, but I'd have to guess that a remake was entirely unnecessary and more of a money grab bringing it to American audiences than it was Preminger needing to articulate some unique vision for the story.

Gonna try to watch at least one more Preminger before the poll is up.