Otto preminger

Born on December 5, 1906 in Vienna – then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – Otto Ludwig Preminger was the son of a Jewish magistrate. Willing to follow in his father’s footsteps, he graduated with a law degree from the college in his hometown. He practiced law for a short time – which explains the realism of his courtroom film Anatomy of Murder–. But since he was 17 years old, he combined his studies with his true passion: theater. He became assistant director of the legendary Max Reinhardt, one of the great theater directors of the time. In the end he decided to hang up the lawyer’s robe, and replaced Reinhardt as head of his theater company, with which he put on more than fifty shows. At that time, he also wanted to try his luck as a film director in his native country, with the forgotten Die Große Liebe , a 1931 film that was an isolated experience, since after filming Preminger returned to concentrating on the stage.

In the mid-1930s, Hitler came to power in Germany, and in Austria the future looked bleak for Jews. Preminger was reluctant to drop everything and start from scratch, but in the end he saw that he had no choice. He decided to try his luck on the Broadway stage, taking advantage of the fact that New York businessmen had once tempted him. It didn’t take long for him to succeed on the other side of the ‘pond’ with ‘Libel’, a show that was very popular at the time. “At the age of 9 I wanted to be an actor. At 19 he was a theater director. At 21 I founded a theater in Vienna that bears my name. And at 26 I went to the United States. Thus, Hitler was not lucky enough to meet me when he arrived in Austria, ”Preminger declared.

When Preminger established himself in the United States, film producers were on the hunt for actors and theater directors who could handle spoken sequences with great fluency. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck offered him a contract with his company, Twentieth Century Fox, and he settled in Hollywood. But both Under Your Spell and Danger-Love at Work were huge commercial failures. In addition, Zanuck was well known for taking part in the filming of his films. This was not very funny to Preminger, who had a heated argument with him during the filming of Kidnapped , which resulted in his immediate dismissal.

Although Preminger could have returned to the theater, he was fascinated by the world of cinema and was reluctant to leave Hollywood. He decided to stay and survived as an actor, specializing in playing German officers – as Erich von Stroheim also did – in mediocre titles, such as They Had Me Covered . They eventually let him return to directing with two minor titles, Margin for Error and also In the Meantime , Darling , the latter also as producer. And it is that Preminger had decided to combine this new facet with the direction, because it was the only way to have creative control of his films. The first film that he considered authentically his was Laura, from 1944, one of the pinnacles of the noir genre, in which detective Mark McPherson ( Dana Andrews ) investigates the murder of a woman ( Gene Tierney ). It can be said that the protagonists became fetish actors from Preminger’s early days, as he repeated with Andrews ( Angel or devil?, Between love and sin ) , with Tierney ( Vorágine ) and with the two together ( On the edge of danger ). Preminger also played William Holden and David Niven ( The Moon Is Blue ) and Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe ( River of No Return ).), although the latter did not leave him convinced. “Working with her was like working with Lassie,” said the filmmaker. “After 14 takes, one had to come out right.”

Although The Tsarina – a Lubitsch film that Preminger finished – was a bittersweet film, it had a comedy tone, something quite surprising, considering the director’s little sense of humor. During the filming of Angel Face –Another great film-noir– he made Robert Mitchum repeat a sequence many times in which he had to slap Jean Simmons . According to the director, Mitchum was not using himself to the fullest, but he realized that he was leaving marks on the actress’s face. As he insisted that he hit him harder, Mitchum walked up to Preminger and slapped him hard. “Does that seem good to you?” sentenced the actor. Apparently, after the incident, Preminger ordered Howard Hughesto throw the actor out of the shoot, but the millionaire interceded for Mitchum, who liked him quite a bit. Luckily for Preminger, as the film is one of his best films, with Jean Simmons as an unforgettable ‘femme fatale’. Preminger also covered the story of another illustrious ‘femme fatale’, Carmen –the character from Bizet and Merimeé–, which gave rise to the musical Carmen Jones , which took place in a parachute factory, and was starring exclusively black actors, in a a time when no film was shot that did not have whites as protagonists and in ninety percent of the supporting roles.

Preminger also risked a lot with The Man with the Golden Arm , a pioneering film in his treatment of drug addiction, with a dazzling work by Frank Sinatra , as a heroin addict, who leaves prison with the desire to start a new life. For St. Joan – his own take on the Joan of Arc story – Preminger cast newcomer Jean Seberg – who had yet to shoot At the End of the Escape – as the lead.–, after interviewing 18,000 candidates. During one of the key sequences a fire broke out on the set that terrified the actress, but Preminger tyrannically insisted on continuing filming without putting out the flames, until she had the shot she wanted. Jean Seberg was also the lead in the excellent Good Morning Sadness , where she was a teenager trying to prevent her father’s ( David Niven ) affair with a woman ( Deborah Kerr ). The film is one of the great works of Preminger, who mistreated the cast members more than ever. “Preminger behaved like a red and a loudmouth. He insulted non-stop throughout the day. Everyone was terrified,” said actress Mylène Demongeot ., who played Elsa, a young lover of the father of the protagonist. “He’s the only director I’ve ever met who would walk out of the screening room mad with rage and insult everyone.” According to Demongeot, Preminger’s fury “made even David Niven nervous, the most perfect gentleman he ever knew, unable to say one word higher than another.” Even Seberg ended up hating him. “I can’t even see him in paint,” she said of him. Divorced from his first two partners, Preminger married one of the actresses from Good Morning Sadness , Hope Bryce, who was with him until her death. With the latter he had two children.

One of his most powerful films was The Anatomy of Murder , with James Stewart , a retired prosecutor defending a lieutenant accused of killing the guy who had raped his wife. Preminger managed to break the ironclad rules of the Hays Code in his subtle but quite explicit description of rape. It was the only film for which Preminger earned an Oscar nomination as a producer, in the best picture category. Although he never won the statuette, he was also nominated two other times, for the aforementioned Laura , and for The Cardinal , with Tom Tryonin the role of a priest who, after being ordained, rises in the ecclesiastical hierarchy until he becomes a member of the College of Cardinals. It is an ambitious blockbuster, like Exodus , about the founding of the state of Israel, with a huge Paul Newman in command of a merchant ship bound for Palestine. For this film, Preminger dared to credit the screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo , who, after being blacklisted, had been working under a pseudonym for a long time.

Preminger denounced political corruption in the masterpiece Tempest Over Washington , with an idealistic senator ( Charles Laughton in his last job) investigating whether the candidate for Secretary of State ( Henry Fonda ) is worthy of the job. The war film First Victory –with John Wayne , Kirk Douglas and again Tom Tryon and Dana Andrews–, and the harrowing thriller The Kidnapping of Bunny Lake are the last great films of the filmmaker, who would retire from cinema with The Human Factor , adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene. Later, he was diagnosed with cancer that ended his life, at the age of 79, on April 23, 1986, in New York.