Otto-cratic personality

A new biography and a traveling film series try to salvage the reputation of director Otto Preminger.

If the name Otto Preminger conjures anything at all for you, it’s probably an image of a bald Teutonic type barking orders on the set, or worse, that guy who played Mr. Freeze on Batman in the 1960s. You might go a little deeper and identify him as the man who directed Laura and Anatomy of a Murder, but you’d probably add that he was famous for his vicious temper and his habit of belittling actors.

In fact, Preminger was at one time considered one of the most important directors working in America. So what happened to Preminger’s reputation? And does he deserve another look? That’s the question posed by a miniretrospective at the Music Box, coordinated with the release of a new biography by Foster Hirsch (Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King; Alfred A. Knopf, $35). The series and the book attempt to save the filmmaker from the semiobscurity into which he has fallen.

Preminger deserves recognition for many of his films (some unfairly dismissed) but also for the ways he changed the business of movie-making, creating a model of independent production that helped bring down the studio system.

Born in 1906 in the small Polish town of Wiznitz (and not, as he later claimed, in Vienna), Preminger led a seemingly charmed life that was in fact the product of his hard work and canny self-promotion. From his early days in the Viennese theater scene through his international notoriety, he seemed to lead his life as a show, with himself as the star.

But his larger-than-life performance as a stern autocrat (his temper was the stuff of Hollywood legend) sometimes overshadowed his skill as a director. “Often he is remembered for his personality more than his films,” Hirsch says.

The hugely successful mystery Laura (1944) moved Preminger into the first ranks of Hollywood directors and began a phase of noirs (Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950; Angel Face, 1952) punctuated with odd side trips into musicals (Centennial Summer, 1946) and an adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play (The Fan, 1949). But he hated taking orders from his studio bosses.

That led him to break out on his own in the early 1950s, when almost no directors dared to work outside the studio system. As an independent, producing as well as directing, Preminger came into his own. He was a master organizer who always came in at or under budget and knew how to promote films with style.

At a time when the studios still followed the content-dictating and prudish Production Code, Preminger embraced such scandalous subjects as drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955) and sex outside marriage (The Moon Is Blue, 1953; Bonjour Tristesse, 1958), and he fought heroic and noisy censorship battles. His championship of free speech made headlines and helped break the back of the Production Code.

Though he was known for his fiery temperament, as a director, Preminger was cool and austere. “It’s a fascinating contradiction,” Hirsch notes. “You’d expect a man with that temper to make very heated, excitable films. They’re not. They’re very reflective and meditative.” Preminger loved long takes, and resisted fancy camera angles and editing. When it works, his detached style works tremendously. Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which follows defense attorney Jimmy Stewart through a murder trial, is one of the best explorations of the legal system in any film. It’s dramatic, of course (it is a murder trial), but even at the tensest moments, Preminger invites us to step back and ask big questions about the relationship between law and justice.

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Preminger seemed obsessed with investigating the workings of large institutions. In the underrated Advise and Consent (1962), Washington, D.C., and congressional procedure come under his spotlight. In the less successful The Cardinal (1963), it’s the Catholic Church.

That’s not to say that all of Preminger’s films are great or even good. Some (The Moon Is Blue; The 13th Letter, 1951) have not aged well, and others, as even a defender like Hirsch admits, are flat-out bad (Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, 1970; Such Good Friends, 1971), but even the clunkers can be fascinating. Hirsch goes out of his way to talk about how awful the bizarre 1968 hippies-versus-mafia LSD trip Skidoo is, but then says, “You have to see it. It’s the kind of awful film only a master director could make.” Spoken like a true believer.

Selected films by Otto Preminger screen at the Music Box Friday 9 through December 2.

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