Tag Archives: Otto Preminger

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING WITH Q&A

(Keir Dullea) comforts his sister (Carol Lynley) in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Stephen (Keir Dullea) tries to comfort his sister, Ann (Carol Lynley), in Bunny Lake Is Missing

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (Otto Preminger, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 7, $15, 7:00
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“I had heard all the rumors about Preminger, but I felt he wouldn’t do that to me. I was wrong, oh so wrong,” Keir Dullea told Foster Hirsch in the 2007 biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, referring to the making of the 1965 psychological noir thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing and Preminger’s notorious treatment of actors. “I was playing a crazy character and the director was driving me crazy. . . . About halfway through the shoot, I began to wonder, Who do you have to f&ck to get off this picture?” On December 7, Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey, David and Lisa) will talk with Hirsch over Zoom following a special screening at Film Forum of the fiftieth anniversary 4K digital restoration of the 1965 work. In the intensely creepy film, loosely based on the novel by Merriam Modell (under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Carol Lynley stars as Ann Lake, a young woman who has just moved to London from New York. She drops off her daughter, Bunny, for her first day of school, but when she returns later to pick her up, there is no evidence that the girl was ever there. When Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) and his right-hand man, Sergeant Andrews (Clive Revill), begin investigating the case, they are soon wondering whether Bunny really exists, more than hinting that she might be a figment of Ann’s imagination.

Television veteran Lynley, who seemed on the verge of stardom after appearing in such films as Return to Peyton Place, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Shock Treatment, and The Poseidon Adventure but never quite reached that next level, gives one of her best performances as Ann, a tortured woman who is determined to stop her world from unraveling around her. Dullea is a model of efficiency as the cold, direct Stephen, a character invented by Preminger and screenwriters John and Penelope Mortimer. Shot in black-and-white by Denys N. Coop on location in London, the film also features cameos by longtime English actors Martita Hunt, Anna Massey, and Finlay Currie as well as the rock group the Zombies and Noël Coward, who plays Ann’s very kooky landlord, Horatio Wilson. Saul Bass’s titles, in which a hand tears paper as if the story is being ripped from the headlines, set the tense mood right from the start. The ending offers some neat twists but is far too abrupt. “No actor ever peaked with him. How could you?” Dullea added to Hirsch about Preminger (Laura, Stalag 17). “The subtlety that I felt I was able to give to my work in 2001, because Stanley Kubrick created a safe atmosphere where actors were not afraid to be foolish or wrong, was missing on Otto’s set. I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.” It should be quite fascinating to hear more from Dullea and Hirsch on December 7; Hirsch will be on hand to sign copies of his book as well.

A FACE IN THE CROWD: REMEMBERING LEE REMICK

Lee Remick lights up the screen in 2K restoration of The Europeans

THE EUROPEANS (James Ivory, 1979)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 20-26
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

From her big-screen debut in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd in 1957, it was clear that Massachusetts native Lee Remick would be more than just another face in the crowd. In conjunction with the theatrical release of the fortieth anniversary 2K restoration of The Europeans, the Quad is celebrating Remick with that 1979 Merchant Ivory costume drama in addition to six other works that make up the too-brief series “A Face in the Crowd: Remembering Lee Remick.” In The Europeans, Remick, who tragically passed away in 1991 at the age of fifty-five, plays the très chic and cultured Eugenia Münster, who has arrived from the continent with her brother, bohemian painter Felix Young (Tim Woodward), seeking to stay awhile with their cousins, the Wentworths, who have a large country estate outside Boston.

Patriarch Mr. Wentworth (Wesley Addy) is suspicious of the siblings, who are very different from his more staid family. Eugenia’s marriage to a German prince is falling apart, so she is in the market for a new partner. One potential match is the ne’er-do-well Clifford Wentworth (Tim Choate), but Eugenia has her eyes on the more mature Robert Acton (Robin Ellis), another cousin of the Wentworths from a different side of the family. Unitarian minister Mr. Brand (Norman Snow) is in love with one of Clifford’s sisters, the iconoclastic, church-skipping Gertrude (Lisa Eichhorn), who has taken a liking to Felix, who thinks that Mr. Brand is a better match for Gertrude’s sister, Charlotte (Nancy New). Also in the mix is Robert’s younger sister, the ingénue Lizzie (Kristin Griffith).

Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from the novella by Henry James, directed by James Ivory, and produced by Ismail Merchant — the trio would also collaborate on James’s The Bostonians (with Remick) in 1984 and The Golden Bowl in 2000 — The Europeans is a slowwwww-moving melodrama that too often feels like it’s going nowhere during its mere ninety minutes. Remick is simply fab as Eugenia, a twinkle ever-present in her sparkling eyes as she bandies about in Judy Moorcroft’s jaw-dropping costumes and dazzling hairdos. The film looks great, courtesy of cinematographer Larry Pizer and art director Jeremiah Rusconi, and Remick is transfixing, lifting another of James’s tales of morally corrupt European nobility vs. the wealthy, prim, upright Puritans of New England. As a bonus, the ninety-one-year-old Ivory (A Room with a View, Call Me by Your Name) will be at the Quad on December 20 for a Q&A following the 7:15 screening.

Lee Remick made her feature-film debut in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd

Remick made twenty-eight feature films and more than two dozen television movies and miniseries in addition to appearing on Broadway several times. The Quad festival, running December 20–26, shows her alongside some of Hollywood’s finest leading men. In Otto Preminger’s gripping and tense Anatomy of a Murder, she’s married to Ben Gazzara, who is on trial for murder, caught between defense attorney James Stewart and prosecutor George C. Scott. In Robert Mulligan’s emotional Baby the Rain Must Fall, Remick is married to Steve McQueen in a story by Horton Foote. Remick was nominated for an Oscar for her daring performance in Blake Edwards’s harrowing Days of Wine and Roses, in which she and Jack Lemmon battle the bottle in a big way. In Gordon Douglas’s gritty, effective The Detective, Remick is having marital problems with Frank Sinatra, a cop on a brutal case. In Richard Donner’s still terrifying The Omen, Remick and Gregory Peck are a high-powered Washington couple who just might be raising the devil. And Remick sizzles in the Trump-ist A Face in the Crowd, in which Andy Griffith made his film debut as well. Remick had a uniquely mesmerizing charm; when she’s onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off her, no matter who she is next to. Head over to the Quad to see for yourself — and be prepared to fall in love with one of the most underrated stars of the twentieth century.

NILSSON SCHMILSSON: MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Oscar nominees Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman try to make it in the big city in John Schlesinger’s powerful and moving MIDNIGHT COWBOY

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (John Schlesinger, 1969)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, October 7, 2:00 & 7:00
Series runs October 7-9
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In 1968, John Lennon proclaimed, “Nilsson! Nilsson for president!” The race might have been between Richard M. Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, but the smart Beatle was declaring his support for Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, who had covered the Fab Four’s “You Can’t Do That” on 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a version that incorporated twenty other Beatles songs in its brief two minutes and sixteen seconds. Nilsson, who died in 1994 at the age of fifty-two, would have turned seventy-five this year, so BAM is celebrating his career as a film composer and sometime actor with the BAMcinématek weekend series “Nilsson Schmilsson,” named after his Grammy-nominated 1971 album. The three-day, five-film fest begins with John Schlesinger’s masterful Midnight Cowboy, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as the worst hustlers ever. The only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar, Midnight Cowboy follows the exploits of Joe Buck, a friendly sort of chap who leaves his small Texas town, determined to make it as a male prostitute in Manhattan. Wearing his cowboy gear and clutching his beloved transistor radio, he trolls the streets with little success. Things take a turn when he meets up with Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo (Hoffman), an ill, hobbled con man living in a condemned building. The two loners soon develop an unusual relationship as Buck is haunted by nightmares, shown in black-and-white, about his childhood and a tragic event that happened to him and his girlfriend, Crazy Annie (Jennifer Salt), while Rizzo dreams of a beautiful life, depicted in bright color, without sickness or limps on the beach in Miami.

Adapted by Waldo Salt (Serpico, The Day of the Locust) from the novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy is essentially a string of fascinating and revealing set pieces in which Buck encounters unusual characters as he tries desperately to succeed in the big city; along the way he beds an older, wealthy Park Ave. matron (Sylvia Miles), is asked to get down on his knees by a Bible thumper (John McGiver), gets propositioned in a movie theater by a nerdy college student (Bob Balaban), has a disagreement with a confused older man (Barnard Hughes), and attends a Warholian party (thrown by Viva and Gastone Rosilli and featuring Ultra Violet, Paul Jabara, International Velvet, Taylor Mead, and Paul Morrissey) where he hooks up with an adventurous socialite (Brenda Vaccaro). Photographed by first-time cinematographer Adam Holender (The Panic in Needle Park, Blue in the Face), the film captures the seedy, lurid environment that was Times Square in the late 1960s; when Buck looks out his hotel window, he sees the flashing neon, with a sign for Mutual of New York front and center, the letters “MONY” bouncing across his face with promise. The film is anchored by Nilsson’s Grammy-winning version of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” along with John Barry’s memorable theme. Iconic shots are littered throughout, along with such classic lines as “I’m walkin’ here!” Midnight Cowboy, which was nominated for seven Oscars and won three (Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director), is screening October 7 at BAM Rose Cinemas; “Nilsson Schmilsson” continues through October 9 with Freddie Francis’s Son of Dracula, starring Nilsson and Ringo Starr, Otto Preminger’s bizarre Skiddoo, Robert Altman’s Popeye, and Fred Wolf’s animated The Point.

RETURN OF THE DOUBLE FEATURE!

return of the double feature

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, August 19, through Tuesday, September 13, $14
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, you could pay one single admission and see two professional baseball games, called a double header. “Let’s play two!” Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, famously said in July 1969. And you could stay and watch both games for one regular price, without having to clear out after the first contest. Also in that magical land of long ago, you see two movies for the price of one, known as a double feature. As Richard O’Brien sings in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I wanna go — oh oh oh oh / to the late night, double feature, picture show.” Film Forum, which often hosts double features, is now honoring the two-pack with “Return of the Double Feature,” twenty-six pairings of fifty-two classic movies, brought together by director, star, theme, writer, or other reason. Master programmer Bruce Goldstein gets things going with the Alfred Hitchcock / Jimmy Stewart duo of Vertigo and Rear Window, followed by Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Breathless, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and The Killing, and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Nosferatu. After that, the double bills become more conceptual, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo with Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place with Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, and, perhaps best of all, Hitchcock’s Psycho with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

psycho repulsion

You can catch Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude and Where’s Poppa?, Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and his own The Lady from Shanghai, and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven. There are double features by Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Terrence Malick, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel; based on novels by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler; and starring Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Toshiro Mifune, and Cary Grant. Among the other dynamic duos are Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief with Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s Ed Wood with Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder with André de Toth’s House of Wax, both shown in 3-D. Instead of bingeing on Netflix, you might as well just settle in for the long haul at Film Forum and take in as much of this superb master class in cinema as you can, presented two flicks at a time, just like in the good old days.

MODERN MATINEES — FIFTEEN BY OTTO PREMINGER: BONJOUR TRISTESSE

Father (David Niven) and daughter (Jean Seberg) have a little talk in lush Otto Preminger melodrama

BONJOUR TRISTESSE (Otto Preminger, 1958)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, May 19, 1:30, and Wednesday, June 15, 1:30
Series continues through June 30
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Douglas Sirk would surely be proud of Otto Preminger’s wickedly obsessive 1958 melodrama, Bonjour Tristesse. Based on the 1954 novel by eighteen-year-old author Françoise Sagan, the film, whose titles translates as “Hello, Sadness,” stars Jean Seberg as Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, a child-adult living the good life while beginning to enjoy the pleasures of drinking, smoking, and sexual desire. She and her wealthy father, Raymond (a dapper David Niven), have moved into a posh villa on the French Riviera for the summer, where the widowed Raymond attempts to balance his time with serious fashion queen Anne Larsen (Deborah Kerr) and flighty young blonde Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). A selfish cad who considers only himself, Raymond is soon in deep water when the two women find out about each other. Meanwhile, Cécile tosses aside her studies in order to flirt with twenty-five-year-old neighbor Philippe (Geoffrey Horne) and other older men who quickly fall in love with her relatively carefree lifestyle, one that seemingly can only end in trouble. Written by Arthur Laurents (Anastasia, The Way We Were), beautifully photographed in color (in Saint-Tropez) and black-and-white (in Paris) by Georges Périnal (Rembrandt, The Fallen Idol), and featuring costumes by Givenchy and jewelry by Cartier, Bonjour Tristesse examines love, lust, power, style, and jealousy, directed with an iron fist by Preminger, who often yelled at and embarrassed Seberg on-set in order to influence her performance. But at the heart of the film is the risqué relationship between Raymond and Cécile, one that more than hints at incest. Bonjour Tristesse is screening May 19 and June 15 as part of the Museum of Modern Art series “Modern Matinees: Fifteen by Otto Preminger,” which continues through June 30 with such other peak-period films by the iconoclastic, dictatorial, independent Austrian auteur as Saint Joan, Exodus, Advise and Consent, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Laura, and The Man with the Golden Arm.

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Stephen (Keir Dullea) tries to comfort his sister, Ann (Carol Lynley), in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (Otto Preminger, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, September 20, $7, 5:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“I had heard all the rumors about Preminger, but I felt he wouldn’t do that to me. I was wrong, oh so wrong,” Keir Dullea told Foster Hirsch in the 2007 biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, referring to the making of the 1965 psychological noir thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing and Otto Preminger’s notorious treatment of actors. “I was playing a crazy character and the director was driving me crazy. . . . About halfway through the shoot, I began to wonder, Who do you have to f&ck to get off this picture?” On September 20, Dullea and Hirsch will be at Film Forum for a one-time-only screening of the fiftieth anniversary 4K digital restoration of Bunny Lake, which will be introduced by Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey, David and Lisa) and followed by a Q&A with the actor, moderated by Hirsch. In the intensely creepy film, loosely based on the novel by Merriam Modell (under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Carol Lynley stars as Ann Lake, a young woman who has just moved to London from New York. She drops off her daughter, Bunny, for her first day of school, but when she returns later to pick her up, there is no evidence that the girl was ever there. When Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) and his right-hand man, Sergeant Andrews (Clive Revill), begin investigating the case, they are soon wondering whether Bunny really exists, more than hinting that she might be a figment of Ann’s imagination.

BLACK & WHITE ’SCOPE: AMERICAN CINEMA

Tony Randall stars as a used car salesman in 1957 Martin Ritt black-and-white CinemaScope tale

Tony Randall plays a used car salesman in 1957 Martin Ritt black-and-white CinemaScope tale

Who: Directors Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, Martin Ritt, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Wise, Samuel Fuller, and others
What: “Black & White ’Scope: American Cinema”
Where: BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100
When: February 27 – March 19
Why: BAMcinématek is presenting twenty-one CinemaScope films shot in glorious black-and-white by such master cinematographers as Gordon Willis, James Wong Howe, Eugen Schüfftan, and Conrad Hall, from such classics as The Apartment, Manhattan, The Hustler, In Cold Blood, The Elephant Man, The Longest Day, and The Three Faces of Eve to such lesser-known fare as The Victors, Forty Guns, China Gate, No Down Payment — featuring Tony Randall as a used car salesman — and the unforgettable (for all the wrong reasons) Rashomom remake The Outrage, starring Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, and William Shatner.