OTTO PREMINGER, S / D

keyboard dipped in olive water

Haven't you heard of science's latest triumph, the Flag Post?

more otto acid anecdotes:

Nick's thirteen-year-old boy, Griffin, had heard Janis Joplin was going to make an appearance at the party, so he talked Lenny into letting him go. At some point in the evening, a bald German man who seemed to be experiencing a bad acid trip latched onto the boy, asking his help getting settled somewhere. "I thought it was Colonel Klink" from the television show Hogan's Heroes, Griffin said. It was the film director, Otto Preminger.

Laura is wonderful

Is twin peaks an extended homage?

if you haven't yet, watch Where the Sidewalk Ends next dmac.

Thanks but just launched into 1944 The Lodger. Will put on list.

Is twin peaks an extended homage?

among many other things, yeah

I have said this before, but Vincent Price as the dim lothario in Laura is an odd sight when you have grown up with the old creepy one.

otm

Watch Daisy Kenyon.

I can't think of another movie with two homos as putative love interests.

re Laura.

Ach ye lads claim everyone

Such Good Friends has some bright lines (written by Elaine May, mostly) that are in the later Mazursky/Woody skewering-Manhattan-neurotics mode, and Dyan Cannon has her moments, but God what a 'hip' mess.

Here's the Glenn Kenny piece at the time of the Olive DVD/BR release, if you want to see Burgess Meredith's nude bit w/out watching it:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/06/preminger-and-the-new-freedoms-such-good-friends-1971.html

Dave Kehr: "The expansive use of widescreen and the carefully choreographed camera movements are gone... replaced by crowded, shallow images of claustrophobic spaces. Packed with some of the most garishly tasteless 1970s décor imaginable, the film’s Park Avenue apartments start to resemble the hamster cage owned by Julie’s two quarrelsome sons. (It’s unclear whom the hamster is supposed to represent, but he remains the film’s most empathetically observed figure.)"

i just read the novel Laura, v much worth it. The Clifton Webb character is tall, obese and even gayer if that's possible; the Vincent Price character is just a desperate Southern 'aristocratic' horndog. Narrator changes with every "part," which i was meh about. Many nice NYC references from the early '40s that will be pleasurable for local history buffs, like Jefferson Market being a women's prison.

I called Such Good Friends "okay, barely" upthread; seemed a little better second time around.

I think Dyan Cannon's good, Ken Howard too. Laurence Luckinbill, her husband, reminds me of Frank Langella in Diary of Mad Housewife: no shading whatsoever, a caricature of male self-absorption circa 1970--he's kind of a drag. James Coco's pretty good, although the scene where Cannon goes down on him while he's on the phone goes on forever. The ending, as I wrote the first time, is nice. Considering when the film came out, right in the midst of the most hopelessly self-indulgent new-American-cinema monstrosities, and considering that Preminger himself was riding the crest of his own auteurist stature, it's really not too bad.

What triggered the sudden interest in hospitals around this time? Within a year of each other, there was Such Good Friends, The Hospital, Frederick Wiseman's Hospital, and some junky thing called Doctor's Wives (Cannon was in that one, too).

Change of Habit w/Elvis & Mary Tyler Moore as well.

Also a bad Peter Sellers film called Where Does It Hurt? (1972).

Also on TV Medical Center peaked in popularity right at that time. Even on daytime TV, General Hospital, which had been one of the less popular soap operas in the '60s, surged to #2 rated soap in 1971-1972.

This hospital thing is actually a question that's occurred to me before. I wonder if it had something to do with the demise of the Production Code in '68. Maybe certain medical topics were considered touchy up to then, and perhaps discouraged by the Code.

Over in Britain there was also The National Health w/Lynn Redgrave.

M*A*S*H* probably fits in there as well.

What most of these films have in common is depicting hospital culture as basically dysfunctional

That's what I was going to say too: that's the focus of the Preminger, Wiseman, and Chayefsky films. It's like all at once the institution was under a lot of scrutiny.

The names in Advise and Consent kill me. Seabright. Brig. Lafe. Dolly. Hardiman. Pidge.

Pidge?

mostly come from Allan Drury (who was quite a reactionary)

I had to buy Otto Preminger's autobiography when I saw a copy on sale last night. Here's the front cover on the left and the back cover on the right. pic.twitter.com/PMCaGsbPJH

— Philip Concannon (@Phil_on_Film) June 19, 2019

love old kool baldies!

Bonjour Tristesse again. Sort of the ultimate tragic D Kerr role, and thru context Seberg somehow doesnt overly evoke a Gidget Goes to the Rivieria vibe.

David Niven's handsy playboy pop is creepy, too.

Anatomy of a Murder acting is so damn good, led by Stewart (as a pretty sneaky lawyer), Remick, Gazzara, Geo C Scott.

The only meh is Arthur O'Connell.

Stewart's work is A+, an example of how he manipulated his aw-shucks persona (e.g. playing with the fishing line in full view of the jury; blowing up knowing full well the judge would rule this or that point inadmissible).

Also, "panties."

Well the writing and casting of Stewart as a foxlike attorney is A+ too; just imagine Gregory Peck, oy.

iMdB, interesting if true:

James Stewart's father was so offended by the film, which he deemed "a dirty picture", that he took out an ad in his local newspaper telling people not to see it.

The only meh is Arthur O'Connell.

Who, of course, was one of the three Oscar nommed.

My Preminger of choice usually goes back and forth between Daisy Kenyon and Advise and Consent, but this one sucks me in every time and might be my private fave.

Edgy admission... KJB is a huge Otto stan but this one has got to be too entertaining for him.

Even with A O'C's reformed drunk, this has less hokey sap than A&C (gay blackmailer face down in the gutter included).

also George C Scott's frozen mug at his eleventh-hour misstep is spectacularly funny.

(btw that young girl playing the dead guy's daughter was played by... Bing Crosby's last wife.)

Sometimes, you are happy when someone dies in a movie. Rarer are you happy when someone commits suicide. One such case is Anne in Bonjour Tristesse.

KJB finally saw Anatomy and loved it.

p sure he'd seen and forgot it

The Human Factor is leaving criterion at the end of the month and worth a watch.

i remember him doing press for that (his last) when it was released. The reviews were respectful, after he'd had a few bombs earlier in the '70s.

is Forever Amber worth checking out? Really not a fan of costume dramas

I think Otto himself was quite displeased with it; predates his autonomous era?

Yes, 1947 I think, replaced John M. Stahl six weeks into shooting. Actually I think it was a deal he made with Zanuck where if he filled in, he could do Daisy Kenyon uninterrupted. Preminger said it was his most expensive movie, "and also the worst."

have you seen Whirlpool, his 1949 gene Tierney noir?

yeah, it's ok

Daisy Kenyon's the masterpiece from this era after Laura.

I like Whirlpool a lot; Jose Ferrer is very funny.

I liked Daisy Kenyon fine but masterpiece seems wild to me, maybe I should revisit... a lot of it just doesn't gel imo, particularly Henry Fonda's thousand yard stare character, seemingly airlifted out of Ford's The Fugitive from the same year.