Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

Peter's Nite
Salad with chopped chicken, Crossont selection, Lemon Torte
Special Guest: Lisa Ottobique

All Movie Guide on Otto Preminger: Originally a law student, Otto Preminger got his first acting experience with Max Reinhardt's theater company while studying for his degree. He entered the theater as a producer and director, came to America as a director in 1935, and was hired by 20th Century Fox. After leaving the studio for Broadway at the end of the '30s, he returned in the early '40s, specializing in Nazi roles despite his Jewish faith. Preminger got back into the director's chair with Margin for Error, an adaptation of a play that he had directed on Broadway. Laura, based upon the hit novel and play by Vera Caspary, was to have been made by Rouben Mamoulian; but he was fired soon after production began, and Preminger took over finished the film, which went on to become a huge hit. The director's most important subsequent movie at Fox was Forever Amber, which failed at the box office but enhanced his reputation nonetheless.

In the early '50s, Preminger became an independent producer/director, and immediately began making a name for himself through a series of successful challenges to the restrictive production code, which forbade the use of various controversial subjects onscreen. His sophisticated comedy The Moon Is Blue broke through the barrier with regard to sexual subject matter with its relatively frank treatment of such topics as virginity and pregnancy, while The Man With the Golden Arm was the first major Hollywood film to deal with drug addiction. Preminger's Carmen Jones proved to be a critically successful venture into musicals, which led directly to being chosen by Samuel Goldwyn to direct the screen adaptation of George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.

Preminger's box-office record was rather scattershot during this era and included the notorious disaster Saint Joan and the hit Anatomy of a Murder.

His early-'60s movies grew in size and pretentiousness, and included such epic-length releases as Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, and In Harm's Way, but, by the middle of the decade, he had receded in ambition and success with Bunny Lake Is Missing, Skidoo, and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The '70s saw the release of the failed thrillers Rosebud and The Human Factor. He died in 1986, several years after the onset of Alzheimer's disease brought an end to his career.

Always a flamboyant personality, Preminger was one of the more visible and better known director/producers of his era, and also became known to an entire generation of children with his portrayal of the villainous Mr. Freeze on the Batman television series.

The dark side of Preminger as Mr. Freeze: Batman Exec producer William Dozier: " Otto I had known for a long time, and he called me from New Your and said ' Bill, I must do a Batman. If I don't do a Batman, my children wont let me come home.' He hadn't acted in 17 years since Watch The Rhine on Broadway. They (guest villains) all got the same amount of money: twenty five hundred dollars. Thats what they got, period."

Adam West: Mr Freeze was out cold on the floor and Batman was supposed to run in and pick him up. In most case an unconscious actor will help the person trying to pick him or her up. They'll go with that person, move the shoulders, bend at the waist, do something, Not Otto. When I ran to pick him up, he stiffened like a sand bag and literally dug his nails into the floor. I couldn't lift two hundred pounds of resisting weight. I dropped him down and we tried again. Same thing. On the next take, my foot accidentally stepped on his hand . He yelled, but he got the message and we were able to continue. As terrible as he was, he still had enough pull in Hollywood where no one would tell him off. There are stores about him where he treated women with great disregard, commented on their breast size and would ask men if they were gay.

There is justice sometimes however, The screen Actors Guild found out he was performing and demanded $11,000 in unpaid dues. The last time he performed before Batman was in Stalag 17 (53). His disposition and general jerk attitude is the reason for the next Mr Freeze episode he was replaced with Eli Wallach.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space."

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

The end of a Preminger shot often has a hallucinatory, fantastic power, as if the scene, suddenly vacated by the narrative, were exposed to the threat - constantly present in Preminger - of the insignificant (cf. the smashed clock at the end of Laura and the camera peering down at a garbage can at the end of Anatomy of a Murder). At the end of the dance-hall sequence in Carmen Jones (1954), after Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) and Joe (Harry Belafonte) have gone offscreen, the camera stays on the front of the house, through the curtained windows of which we see people dancing inside. Or, at the end of the party scene in Advise and Consent, Van Ackerman (George Grizzard) approaches the camera and beckons to his offscreen driver as the shot dissolves. The entire final section of Angel Face is a terrifying descent into nothingness. The threat of such a collapse haunts Bonjour Tristesse, with its repeated dissolves between color past and black-and-white present.

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

SAUL BASS (1920-1996): was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles".

Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero - a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra - to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face - as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing now, because it was so imitated".

Even before he made his cinematic debut, Bass was a celebrated graphic designer. Born in the Bronx district of New York in 1920 to an emigré furrier and his wife, he was a creative child who drew constantly. Bass studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism.

After apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms, Bass worked as a freelance graphic designer or "commercial artist" as they were called. Chafing at the creative constraints imposed on him in New York, he moved to Los Angeles in 1946. After freelancing, he opened his own studio in 1950 working mostly in advertising until Preminger invited him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.

Now over-shadowed by Bass’ later work, Carmen Jones elicited commissions for titles for two 1955 movies: Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But it was his next Preminger project, The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the doyen of film title design.

Over the next decade he honed his skill by creating an animated mini-movie for Mike Todd’s 1956 Around The World In 80 Days and a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958 Bonjour Tristesse. Blessed with the gift of identifying the one image which symbolised the movie, Bass then recreated it in a strikingly modern style. Martin Scorsese once described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly recognisable and immediately tied to the film".

In 1958’s Vertigo, his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock, Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and then her eye before spinning it into a sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the screen. For his next Hitchcock commission, 1959’s North by Northwest, the credits swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal lines like passengers stepping off elevators. It is only a few minutes after the movie has begun - with Cary Grant stepping out of an elevator - that we realise the grid is actually the façade of a skyscraper.

Equally haunting are the vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif at the beginning of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. This staccato sequence is an inspired symbol of Norman Bates’ fractured psyche. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to work on the film itself, notably on its dramatic highpoint, the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh.

More on Saul Bass: One marked characteristic of the Bass title is that its images undergo a journey whereby they are transformed into the unexpected. A famous example is the flower petal in the opening sequence to Bonjour Tristesse, which transforms several times before resolving into a teardrop. In the opening to Hitchcock's North by Northwest, bars of text ascend and descend, mimicking elevators in motion, white lines invade the screen, simulating the grid pattern in the skyscraper that dominates the opening shot. Another of Bass's famed transformations is the eyeball that swirls into the vortex at the opening of Vertigo.

Saul Bass. Did I actually make l1 films with Preminger? After the sixth, I stopped counting. Otto had a vision. A true artistic, visual vision. He believed that he knew what he knew and he believed that what he knew, together with what would come out of our work, was worth defending to the death. He also had the bullheadedness to take that position and the clout to pull it off. Stanley Kubrick is that way too, but I don't know anybody else quite like it. There are many directors today who have enormous clout, but they don't have a graphic vision. They care about the advertising, but they don, t start with a point of view. And if they have a point of view, they're not sure enough about it, or don't care enough to make a federal case out of it. You can see the result in the state of film graphics and advertising today. In many cases the advertising is quite effective, but ultimately, unmemorable.

When I began to do titles many many years ago - the dark ages, when designers lived in caves - I went through a very intense learning experience with some extraordinary film-makers. I'm referring to the Wylers, the Wilders, the Hitchcocks, and the Premingers. It was an extraordinary experience, cutting your eye teeth within that framework. So I began thinking about what to do at the beginning of a film. Obviously, the point of any title is to support the film. As you know, I created a lot of stuff, which, it would be fair to say, constituted a reinvention of the film title.

My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film, s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

I had a strong feeling that films really began on the first frame. This was, of course, back when titles were strictly typography - mostly bad typography - and constituted the period when people were settling in, going to restrooms, or involved in chitchat. I just felt that this was a period that could work for the film. Otto Preminger agreed with me and we took a shot at it.

My actual entry into film began when Otto asked me to design a title for The Man with the Golden Ann. This opportunity grew out of my having designed the original graphic symbol for the film. The symbol for the film turned out to be about as difficult to accept as the film itself. It also broke from the general point of view about how you sold films. The notion that a single visual element, good, bad, or indifferent, could become a statement for a film is not a notion that existed before The Man with the Golden Arm. Before that period, almost all film ads, no, all film ads, used a potpourri approach. Advertisers threw everything into the pot, using the theory that, as a filmgoer, you would find something in the ad that would inspire you to see the film. I used to call this the "See, See, See" approach: See the missionaries boil in oil. See the virgins dancing in the temple of doom. See Krakatoa blow its to - that kind of thing. If you didn't like one image, you'd like another. The idea of having a film expressed within the framework of one single, reductive statement was a very daring notion in the 50s. It was a particularly scary notion for distributors and filmmakers alike. You were saying, of course, that you could make one statement that would be sufficiently provocative and true to the film, and that would sell the film. At the time, and this was to Otto's credit, he didn't flinch when this occurred.

New York Times: Cleveland-born Keir Dullea found himself in the thick of Manhattan's intellectual scene when his parents took over the management of a Greenwich Village bookstore. Dullea attended Rutgers and San Francisco State, then launched his acting career in regional theater. He made a spectacular film debut in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), playing a born-to-hang juvenile delinquent.

He was more sympathetic but no less emotionally disturbed in 1962's David and Lisa; as late as 1965, he was still playing mentally unstable youths in films like Bunny Lake is Missing. The biggest film hit with which Dullea was associated was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which he played the time-and-space-travelling astronaut Bowman. He repeated this characterization (and answered several of the questions posed by 2001) in the 1984 sequel 2010. Though he'd been active on the New York stage in the 1950s, Keir Dullea did not appear on Broadway until 1970, when the 34-year-old actor portrayed a twentysomething blind man in Butterflies are Free.

Cinematographer Denys Coop: Entered film industry at the age of 16 under apprenticeship to Freddie Young at Elstree Studios. Worked at Pinewood Studios and Denham Studios. Served in the Fleet Air Arm. Was transferred to the Army Kinematograph Service near the end of WW2. Re-entered the industry at Shepperton Studios under contract to Alexander Korda. Became freelance in 1956. Ph commercials dir by Dick Clement, Tom Bussmann, a.o. Was member and president of the BSC.

Awards: BAFTA Film Award nom [1964] for 'Billy Liar'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1965] for 'King and Country'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1967] for 'Bunny Lake Is Missing'; 'Oscar' AA 'Special Achievement Award' [1978; shared] & BAFTA 'Michael Balcon Award' [1979; shared] for 'Superman'.

'Kordas, Reeds and (especially) visiting Yanks - it reads like a potted history of better class British cinema. Unfortunately there is no better class British cinema any more, and Coop now films boring asylums and other vaults of horror. And there is also the question of the colour. Without wishing to put down Coop's recent colour work too drastically, it hasn't even remotely matched the perfectly measured blacks and whites of 'Bunny Lake Is Missing' or the additional greys of 'King & Country' and 'This Sporting Life'. British cinema will no doubt stick to the belief that colour and only colour is beautiful. Obviously, this is no fault of Coop's and quite probably he regrets the situation as much as we do.' [Markku Salmi in Film Dope, No. 8, October 1975.]

Screenonline on John Mortimer: Educated at Harrow and Oxford, barrister-author John Mortimer has had one of the most eclectically prolific careers of any British writer of the latter half of the 20th century. Most famous now as the creator of TV's irascible Rumpole of the Bailey (ITV, 1978-79, 1983, 1987-88, 1991, 1992), he also wrote such other series as Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981), one of TV's greatest succès d'estime, and Paradise Postponed (ITV, 1986), as well as the autobiographical stage play, Voyage Round My Father (1971, with Alec Guinness; on TV, 1982, with Laurence Olivier).

His cinema work has been comparatively limited: as a scriptwriter with the Crown Film Unit during WW2, he worked on such films as Children on Trial (d. Jack Lee, 1946); he contributed dialogue to Ferry to Hong Kong (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1959) and The Innocents (d. Jack Clayton, 1961); two of his plays were adapted to the screen, Lunch Hour (by himself) and The Dock Brief (both d. James Hill, 1962); and he wrote several other screenplays over a long period, including the surprisingly sentimental Tea with Mussolini (UK/Italy, d. Franco Zeffirelli, 1999).

He married two women called Penelope: the first the novelist Penelope [Fletcher] Mortimer (b.North Wales, 1918) with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for Bunny Lake Is Missing (d. Otto Preminger, 1965) and whose novel, The Pumpkin Eater, was filmed in 1964 (d. Jack Clayton); the second Penelope Glossop, mother of Emily Mortimer. He was made a CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1998.