A kind tyrant | 10 June 2009

‘Ajuxtaposition of incompatible elements.’ So Chris Fujiwara describes one of Otto Preminger’s more obscure films in his critical biography of the Hollywood director. But the phrase so encapsulates what I had come to think about Preminger’s entire output that I underlined it, underlined it again, and made a mental note to quote it at the beginning of this review. You see, from urbane noir flicks to period romps to weighty historical dramas, his work seems to differ in tone and content almost as much as it does in quality. Incompatible elements, indeed.

Little wonder, then, that the auteurist critics of the 1960s — whose mantle Fujiwara adopts here — enjoyed the challenge of sifting through Preminger’s work for any common creative threads, before celebrating him as one of the greats. Preminger’s reputation may have faded in the intervening years, but you can still see what excited them all in the first place. When Preminger was on form, he created some of the most endlessly rewarding films to emerge in and around studio-era Hollywood. There’s the perversely ambiguous Laura (1944), of course. Its dark sister pieces: Daisy Kenyon (1947), Whirlpool (1949) and Angel Face (1952). The Sinatra-as-a-junkie shock of The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). And the greatest of all American courtroom dramas: Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

But if Preminger created some great films, then he also created some great film history. Some of the most lively sections of The World and its Double concern Preminger’s efforts to push back the boundaries of what could be shown, said or intimated on screen. His battles with the authorities over the depiction of sex in The Moon is Blue (1953), or of drug-abuse in The Man with the Golden Arm, effectively brought an end to the backwards-looking censorship of the Production Code Administration.