The Otto factor

OTTO PREMINGER was not what you’d call a mild man. The director of “Laura” (1944), “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955) and “Carmen Jones” (1954) had an effect on others that was, shall we say, palpable. Elaine Barrymore remembers the forbidding, bald Preminger as “so Germanic that I felt he was more a nation than a human being.” Years after the filmmaker’s death in 1986, a bilious Leon Uris had this to say: “Otto was a terrorist -- he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein.” Perhaps more existentially telling is Carol Channing’s experience of being directed in the “fascinating train wreck” of “Skidoo” (1968) by a man who made a side career playing Nazis and “Batman” villain Mr. Freeze: “For me it was like having a nightmare in which you open your mouth and no sound emerges.”

In “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King,” Brooklyn College film historian Foster Hirsch weaves interviews with industry players and family members into a straightforward chronology of Preminger’s wide-ranging career. This comprehensive biography of the redoubtable impresario is the first since Preminger’s ghostwritten account in 1977. It begins not in Vienna, where Preminger hinted that he was born, but in the “depressed backwater” of Wiznitz, Poland. As the book often demonstrates, circumstance was rarely an obstacle. In 1915, when Otto was 10, his father, an ambitious lawyer, relocated the family to Vienna, where he prosecuted insurgents on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- a formidable rise, considering that he was a Jew who refused to convert to Catholicism.

As his father navigated the legal system, so Otto moved through the Viennese theater world, first as a 17-year-old protege of Max Reinhardt and later as a director. In 1935, facing rising anti-Semitism, the wunderkind did not so much flee as saunter out of the country, accepting an offer to direct on Broadway. This coincided with an invitation from Joseph Schenk, head of 20th Century Fox, to come to Hollywood. After shouting back at Fox Vice President Darryl F. Zanuck, Preminger was essentially banned from the film industry. He took refuge directing on Broadway, returning to Hollywood when Zanuck enlisted during World War II and rapidly ascending through the studio system. As Hirsch notes, not only was Preminger known for finishing productions on time and under budget but he also was “temperamentally suited to the highly regularized approach of the so-called classical Hollywood style, defined by objective, centered compositions, ‘invisible’ continuity editing, and unobtrusive camera work.”

Hirsch does not position Preminger as “an artistic renegade determined to dismantle the system’s visual codes,” but he takes the director’s films seriously, offering cogent analyses not only of the classics but also of the underrated (1979’s “The Human Factor”) and the unratable (1975’s “Rosebud”). Unlike Ernst Lubitsch, his next-door neighbor in Bel-Air, Preminger had no eponymous “touch.” Film scholars do not talk about “Premingerian” suspense. Preminger, Hirsch writes, “was immune to theory,” and Method acting was beside the point. “His comments,” says actor John Martello,”were about blocking, not about acting values or theme or character.” Keir Dullea, the object of Preminger’s abuse during the filming of “Bunny Lake Is Missing” (1965), says: “Nobody ever gave the performance of his career in a Preminger film.”

Dullea was hardly the director’s only target. Preminger bullied Jean Seberg, Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn Monroe, as well as his crew. On the set of “Angel Face” (1952), he insisted that Robert Mitchum actually slap Jean Simmons. After repeated takes, Mitchum turned and smacked Preminger. Usually the director is described as purple-faced, although his son Erik, product of a one-night stand with Gypsy Rose Lee, recalls him in one outburst as “bright red.” But for each such anecdote there’s a counterexample of his generosity and courtliness -- such as his patience with Kim Novak (on the set of “The Man With the Golden Arm”), of whom he said, “She’d been treated like a nincompoop, but she’s really quite shrewd.” When Liza Minnelli was rushed to the hospital with a kidney-stone attack during filming of “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon” (1970), Preminger went with her. A notorious womanizer, he wed three times, the last time to costume designer Hope Bryce, who outlived him. He is depicted repeatedly as a loving family man.

Preminger, who so often deployed his power against individuals, did so against the institution of Hollywood as well; the resulting legacy is profound. In 1953, he defied the Production Code Administration, premiering “The Moon Is Blue” despite its having been condemned by the Legion of Decency and denied a Code seal. He was the first independent producer-director to emerge from the collapsing studio system and the first to break the blacklist, crediting writer Dalton Trumbo on “Exodus” (1960).

If there is a signature Preminger genre, it may be the well-crafted legal melodrama. As his father had commanded crowd-drawing trials in Vienna, so Preminger exuded an autocratic style that adroitly marshaled large ensemble casts in such procedurals as “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Advise & Consent” (1962). Hirsch’s treatment, based on myriad interviews, might have suited him. “Otto Preminger” approaches oral history; it’s a smart tactic for a subject “who hardly wrote a letter in his life.”

What ultimately emerges from the many voices and extensive quotes in this book is not so much a portrait of the man as of his reflection flickering in the eyes of the people who loved and feared him. Preminger’s widow, moving in her devotion, attempts so often to evoke her husband’s tenderness that the book at times seems an exercise in posthumous reconciliation. “Otto thought Keir was terrific” in “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” she says of Dullea -- to which the actor responds, “Why didn’t he ever tell me?”