FALLEN ANGELS: THE FILMS OF OTTO PREMINGER at Cinematheque Ontario (Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas East), from Friday (May 29) to July 2. 416-968-FILM. See Indie & Rep listings. Rating: NNNN
When Cinematheque Ontario’s long-awaited Otto Preminger retrospective gets underway this week, the one person who’d have enjoyed it the most won’t be in attendance.
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There was no bigger Preminger booster than the late John Harkness – my friend, colleague and predecessor in this very gig.
John always championed Preminger’s cool proficiency and varied output, from the director’s 20th Century Fox noirs in the 1940s (starting with the essential, genre-defining Laura, which opens the series Friday) to his more elaborate prestige entertainments of the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote his Columbia thesis on Preminger’s use of widescreen compositions, and named the director’s 1959 courtroom drama Anatomy Of A Murder “one of the 10 best American sound films” in a post to one of the Usenet newsgroups we both frequented a decade ago.
Preminger is viewed today as one of those Stanley Kramerish directors who spent a good chunk of his career turning Big, Important Novels into Big, Important Movies. If Preminger were working today, he’d be snapping up the rights to everything in Oprah’s Book Club.
But where Kramer couldn’t stop reminding his audience how very weighty his films were, Preminger saved his editorializing for the talk-show circuit and dedicated himself to telling good stories.
His matter-of-fact mise en scène and fondness for undemonstrative actors like Dana Andrews, William Holden, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda and even Tom Tryon have a way of leading people to underestimate his work. If you’ve only caught pieces of Advise And Consent or River Of No Return or even Anatomy Of A Murder while channel-surfing past AMC, you might not have given them a second thought. But to watch them from beginning to end is to marvel at Preminger’s total control of their construction. He may have been a raging egomaniac, but the man knew how to make movies.
Cinematheque’s series takes a good long wallow in Preminger’s filmography, with restored prints of Laura (Friday, May 29), Margin For Error (July 2), Forever Amber (June 30), Fallen Angel (June 4), The Moon Is Blue (June 6), Carmen Jones (June 16), River Of No Return (June 11), Bonjour Tristesse (Saturday, May 30 ), The Man With The Golden Arm (June 13), Anatomy Of A Murder (Sunday, May 31), Advise And Consent (June 15) and Bunny Lake Is Missing (June 20). Another nine films, including his pair of 1950 noirs Whirlpool (June 5) and Where The Sidewalk Ends (June 6) and the 1960s epics Exodus (June 19), The Cardinal (June 25) and In Harm’s Way (June 23), will be shown in the best prints available.
It’s the widescreen entries that really sing on the big screen, of course. The Rocky Mountains sprawling across the frame in River Of No Return, the characters pacing through Washington’s back rooms in Advise And Consent, the chambers of the Vatican in The Cardinal, the cast-of-thousands spectacle of Exodus – these are movies that just don’t pack the same punch in your living room. Preminger calibrated his dramas for the movie house, and even the most impressive home-theatre rig gets the scale wrong.
Preminger’s reputation as a provocateur seems misplaced today. The mild raciness of The Moon Is Blue, the forensic discussions of torn lingerie in Anatomy Of A Murder and the implications of closeted homosexuality in Advise And Consent seem almost quaint four or five decades after gossip columnists scandalized readers with lurid predictions of excess. (The most shocking thing about Anatomy Of A Murder was probably the use of the word “panties” in a courtroom setting – hardly a shocker in the age of the Law & Order and CSI franchises.)
The more time I spend with Preminger’s films, the more I realize that John was right: Anatomy Of A Murder is the director’s best work. It’s a hell of a trial picture, so crisply drawn and memorably performed that it doesn’t even matter that half the cast is acting in that clipped, theatrical style that went out of fashion almost as soon as the film rolled onto screens 50 years ago.
I still can’t pinpoint the moment when we realize that neither Jimmy Stewart’s defence attorney nor George C. Scott’s prosecutor actually cares whether Ben Gazzara’s hotheaded soldier really was mentally competent when he shot the man who allegedly raped his wife – they’re just out to sway the jury and win the case. The truth about the act itself is entirely beside the point.
John once observed that Anatomy does a much better job of considering the relativity of truth than Rashomon, making the same point without any of the fancy flashback stuff. Damn, but I wish he were writing this instead of me.
normw@nowtoronto.com
