Under Budget, Over the Top
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King
by Foster Hirsch
Knopf. 592 pp. $35.00
His name has descended into obscurity in the two decades since his death, but Otto Preminger (1905-1986) was once a very famous man, one of the handful of film directors powerful enough to insist that his own name appear above the title of the movies he directed. At the height of his career, he was as well-known as Alfred Hitchcock. But rather than contend with Hitchcock for the title of “master of suspense,” Preminger became the master of manufactured controversy, working hand in hand with a willing press to challenge the strictures of Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship system. Preminger practically pioneered the use of coy outrage as a marketing ploy, as when he insisted on his characters speaking the words “virgin” and “mistress” in The Moon Is Blue (1953), despite a 20-year ban imposed by the Production Code and the condemnation of the League of Decency, a Catholic organization that set itself the task of policing popular culture.
Nor was Preminger’s battle on behalf of “adult” filmmaking the only cause of his celebrity. An imposing man with a thick Austrian accent and a massive bald pate, Preminger played memorable onscreen villains in fare as varied as the Batman television series and the World War II drama Stalag 17. Preminger’s role as a German prison-camp warden in the latter film was an inside joke of sorts between him and its director, Billy Wilder, because this putative Nazi came from a family of Polish-Jewish strivers.
His father, Markus Preminger, had been born poor in Galicia, an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but proved himself so capable and charming that he enjoyed a meteoric rise as a civil servant and was eventually offered a position as the empire’s chief prosecutor. There was, however, one condition: Mar-kus had to convert to Catholicism. When he refused (“my father simply would not renounce his Judaism,” Otto’s brother Ingo said), he managed to secure the post nevertheless.
The elder Preminger relocated the family to Vienna when Otto was ten, and there set his son on a path to success as a man of the theater. Otto moved to the United States in 1935; his parents followed three years later, after Hitler’s invasion of Austria.
Yet there was indeed something in Preminger’s personal conduct that led not a few people to liken him to the Nazi he played so convincingly in Stalag 17. Leon Uris, whose novel Exodus was the source of Preminger’s endless 1960 movie of that name, could hardly have been more plain-spoken. “Otto was a terrorist,” he said years later. “He’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein.”
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This startling sentiment appears in Foster Hirsch’s comprehensive new biography of Preminger, and clearly represented a challenge of sorts to the author. Drawn to the “sheer size and scale of that personality, along with my conviction that his often elegant work has been largely misjudged or undervalued,” Hirsch set out to correct the record on both. But his case for the subtlety of the work is overshadowed by his portrait of his subject’s gargantuan lack of personal subtlety of any kind.
Preminger’s on-set temperament might be described as sadomasochism without the masochism. “Kill the Jew!” was his memorable way of directing an actor to get rid of an ill-conceived Yiddish accent. Shooting a scene in Angel Face that called for Robert Mitchum to strike Jean Simmons, Preminger, Hirsch writes, “made the actor ‘slap her for real’ and insisted on a number of retakes before an enraged Mitchum turned to the director and smacked him.” He also seemed to take particular relish in correcting his leading men on how to kiss, while engaging in torrid affairs with performers from Gypsy Rose Lee (whom he married) to Dorothy Dandridge. Although a number of Hirsch’s interviewees were prepared to defend Preminger, their testimony amounts mostly to the paradox, unresolved by Hirsch, that he was cruel in public but kind in private.
Growing up with privilege and confidence in Vienna had accustomed Preminger to high style. “He knew the art of living,” one friend said, and clearly preferred it to the art of art. Despite his success in the theater, he was unable to mount a successful production of a serious literary play. As a director and producer he had one skill that would stand him in unique stead for the rest of his career: he usually came in under budget. Indeed, his financial prudence and his facility with popular fare led him to the presidency of Vienna’s Jofestadt theater company, which in turn led to the 1935 offer from Fox Studios to come to Hollywood. He accepted on the spot.
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He needed nine years to break through. By dint of executive acumen alone, he survived a personal blacklisting by Daryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, following an unwise shouting match. Eventually, he became Zanuck’s go-to guy, trusted to mop up flailing productions swiftly and cheaply. After salvaging a few duds, he was allowed to direct Laura in 1944. Hirsch properly characterizes this career-making classic as a “deliciously perverse” murder mystery, and it made Preminger a force to reckon with in Hollywood.
Hirsch describes Preminger as “a master of long takes . . . and of complexly composed long shots and sinuous camera movement.” In fact, Preminger’s films are ambiguous in a manner unusual for Hollywood then and now. They seem objective, understated, unsentimental, genuinely realist in approach. With none of the moist petulance that infuses modern crime dramas, Anatomy of a Murder (1959) depicts every nuance of a murder trial in small-town Michigan that ends in an apparently false verdict. And just as that movie offers a close-up analysis of the jury system, Advise and Consent (1962) exposes every sordid twist and turn in the U.S. Senate’s handling of a contentious confirmation hearing involving the President’s nominee for Secretary of State.
What makes these films tick, as Hirsch points out, is Preminger’s passion for process. He celebrates American law and democracy by peeling away all false sentiment until their fascinating underlying rhythms are in clear view. The effect, Hirsch demonstrates, is surprisingly life-affirming, reminding us that Preminger, at his best, was very good indeed. If Anatomy is still the gold standard of courtroom dramas, Advise and Consent remains the most quietly patriotic film ever made. Laura, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) are all top-notch examples of film noir. Finally, Preminger’s cinematic treatment of sex retains its erotic edge, even though the battles he fought over it seem no more controversial today than a marital double bed.
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Although Hirsch writes well about the Preminger style and the virtues of his work, he has nothing interesting to say about Preminger’s politics, which he superficially describes as Democratic and liberal. This hardly seems sufficient. “Otto called himself a liberal, but a true liberal doesn’t treat people the way he did,” an actor named Larkin Ford is quoted as saying. “I have a feeling he would have voted for George Bush.”
This may be mere thoughtless stereotyping, but still: a raving Roosevelt Democrat who could have voted for Bush? That is an interesting mix for sure, worthy of a biographer’s attention, but evidently beyond Hirsch’s ken. He does not seem to be aware that Preminger makes a bracing appearance in Tom Wolfe’s peerless 1970 essay, “Radical Chic,” about the notorious Leonard Bernstein cocktail party at which New York’s beautiful people feted the Black Panthers. Practically alone among the attendees, Preminger would have none of it.
This otherwise well-researched book is full of juicy bits. But just as Hirsch cannot capture the contradictions of Preminger’s ideological convictions, neither can he resolve what he rightly describes as “the apparent contradiction between the director’s temperament and the cool tone of his most commanding films.” That cool tone is Preminger’s legacy as an artist; as Hollywood legacies go, it is an uncommonly notable one.
