ANATOMY OF A MOVIE—Otto Preminger & Dana Andrews: Laura (1944)

Currently screening at the Pacific Film Archive through December 20, 2009 is a 14-film tribute "Otto Preminger: Anatomy of a Movie", curated by Steve Seid. The first three entries in the series—Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945) and Daisy Kenyon (1947)—constitute the heft of Otto Preminger's collaboration with actor Dana Andrews, with the exception of Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), which has not been included in the series (though—incidentally enough—it reunited the Laura duo: Andrews and Gene Tierney).

So much has been written about Otto Preminger that it seems foolish to reiterate what's already been stated many times over. Within immediate parameters, however, Steve Seid has synopsized: "As legend would have it, Otto Preminger was a bald-headed baddy scolding helpless actors about flaws in their performance—the tyrant on the set. But Preminger's films, some thirty-seven in all, bear no sign of this heated temperament, instead sharing a muted detachment that ironically excites our own engagement with his complex characters. …Preminger promoted a cool take on human nature that simultaneously savored cinema's expansive visual spaces; over time his eloquent way with the camera grew complex and sensuous. The willful director's insistence on artistic autonomy compelled him to become one of the first champions of independent film."

There are, of course, the career overviews offered by James Quandt, Thomas Gale, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Tag Gallagher and Chris Fujiwara. James Quandt cleverly finesses the alphabet to review Preminger's career from autocrat to Zanuck at the Cinémathèque Ontario website; Thomas Gale's entry on Preminger for The Encyclopedia of World Biography can be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay "The Preminger Enigma" is at The Chicago Reader website; Tag Gallagher's Film International essay on Preminger's "heroic" films can also be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; and Chris Fujiwara's nuanced profile for the Great Directors database can be found at Senses of Cinema.

Fujiwara, in fact, has provided the most recent biography on Preminger: The World and Its Double (Faber & Faber, 2008), published close on the heels of Foster Hirsch's own notable study Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (Knopf/Random House, 2007). Earlier, in his Film International DVD review "4 x Otto Preminger" (May 2004, Vol. 2, Issue 3), Fujiwara convincingly contested the oft-stated ascription of "film noir" to the suite of Preminger films that include Laura, Fallen Angel, Where The Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool (1950), The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952). Fujiwara argued against this received wisdom: "It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as 'films noirs' is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954) as a musical; or In Harms Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger's films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms."

Fujiwara further pointed out that films like Laura, Fallen Angel, and Whirlpool "depart radically from the 'film noir' pattern … characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings."

Laura (1944)

Dana Andrews—a popular leading man in the 1940s—has never been one of my favorite actors, though his brooding performance as the smitten detective Mark McPherson is unquestionably one of his best. In her profile of Andrews at Bright Lights Film Journal, Imogen Sarah Smith has written: "Dana Andrews, with his naturally tamped-down style and his gift for ambivalence, was an ideal leading man for Preminger. Apart from The Best Years of Our Lives, Andrews' four films with Preminger … were the peak of his career, and they gave him his most complex and compelling roles."

In "Acting Like Children", his 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews admitted: "People very often say to me that Laura was my first picture. Well, it's the first one they saw, which is why they think that." His recollections of the behind-the-scenes intrigues that shaped Laura—specifically his characterization of Detective McPherson—details how then-producer Preminger deviously wrested directorial control away from Rouben Mamoulian (the film's original director) by strategically aligning himself with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Andrews opines: "I think Mr. Preminger wanted to be a producer-director." Andrews also recounts how he and Preminger disagreed on a point of direction and stared each other down in stony silence for hours, "acting like children."

Allegedly, Zanuck's dissatisfaction with Rouben Mamoulian's interpretation of Detective McPherson as an Ivy-league criminologist clashed with Zanuck's preference for a tough "right-down-the-alley type of detective" more familiar to audiences. Preminger's willingness to cater to Zanuck's vision on such a major issue distracted the studio head from his noted objection to the casting of Clifton Webb in the role of Waldo Lydecker. Andrews recollected that Laura was Webb's first motion picture. "He'd been under contract to MGM for 18 months and never done a foot of film—never had seen himself on the screen." According to David Boxwell at Bright Lights Film Journal, the homophobic Zanuck was initially displeased with Webb's portrayal of Lydecker as an effete and waspish socialite; however, Preminger convinced Zanuck that such effeminacy suited the character and provided comic contrast to the traditionally masculine Andrews.

Originally, as Eddie Muller intimated in his Noir City introduction of Hangover Square (1945), Mamoulian had wanted Laird Cregar for the role of Lydecker; but, Preminger worried that Cregar—who had gained notoriety playing the sinister role of Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1944)—would lead the audience to become suspicious of Lydecker earlier than necessary. When Cregar died of a heart attack after a drastic attempt to lose weight for the role, Preminger brought in Clifton Webb. It's now nearly inconceivable that anyone else could deliver Lydecker's vicious bon mots more stingingly, which to this day delight audiences with their unfettered bitchiness. "The voice alone would have carried the performance: the tone of a courtly buzz saw, the razor diction dining on consonants as if they were truffled squab," Richard Barrios has written in Screened Out: Playing Gay In Hollywood From Edison to Stonewall (Routledge, 2003:202).

Despite Lydecker's homosexuality having been removed from the script early on (though, as Barrios continues, "the rewritten character's bouts of hetero-jealousy [sit] oddly upon Webb's epicene deportment"), Clifton Webb's performance of Waldo Lydecker has gone down in cinema history as one of the great gay characters on film; the epitome of the "mannered, high-gloss style" that David Thomson pointedly identifies in his recent book The Moment of Psycho (Perseus Books 2009, p. 43) as a "code for homosexuality" in American films of the '30s, '40s and '50s.

In retrospect, Preminger's direction of both Andrews and Webb—and the characterizations they finally settled upon—served to manifest a tension essential to Laura's suspense. As Imogen Sarah Smith has correctly perceived in her Bright Lights Film Journal profile: "Preminger was right about McPherson. Not playing him as hard-boiled not only destroys the comedy in his interactions with Laura's friends, it eliminates the tension within Mark's character as he begins to feel and behave in ways no one would expect of a standard-issue tough cop. Laura introduces the essential Dana Andrews character: the Average Joe with unexpected complications. It also demonstrates the Preminger Paradox: the director was a notorious tyrant, prone to tantrums and sadism often directed at the most vulnerable of his actors, yet the keynote of his films was tolerance for ambiguity. Ensembles in shades of gray, full of subtle, tamped-down performances, his films never turn on a simple axis of good and evil but listen to many voices and allow each some degree of persuasiveness."

Smith evokes the "long, wordless sequence, followed by Preminger's fluidly tracking camera" wherein "McPherson prowls around Laura's apartment, ostensibly looking for clues but really indulging his insatiable desire for communion with the dead woman. Reading her letters and her private journal isn't enough; he opens her closets, fingers her silky handkerchiefs (obvious Hays Code stand-ins for her unmentionables), and sniffs her perfume. He doesn't linger over things sensually; he fidgets brusquely, irritated by his own romantic yearning. He heads for the liquor cabinet and gulps Scotch while gazing at Laura's portrait. He snarls at Waldo Lydecker, who hits the nail on the head when he sneers, 'I wonder you don't come here like a suitor with flowers and a box of candy.' Mark couldn't, or wouldn't, openly admit his own feelings: cops just don't find themselves in the grip of morbid, perfumed obsession with dames who have been bumped off. But he knows that Waldo is right, hence his seething, brooding restlessness. Alone again, he plants himself in front of the portrait and nurses a drink until he falls into a stupor."

This pivotal scene—underscored by David Raskin's haunting theme (with belated lyrics by Johnny Mercer)—is seductive in its gravitational allure. It's one of my favorite scenes in Laura and one of my favorite scenes in film altogether. Rarely has desire for what is absent been so sensuously embodied in an imagined presence, save perhaps Portrait of Jennie (1948). It reminds me of what poet Mark Doty once wrote in his equally haunting study Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (Beacon Press 2001:3-4): "I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really—[rather, it's] that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, having allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and the life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness towards experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world."

Cross-published on Twitch.

ECCENTRIC CINEMA: COMING APART (1969)—A Critical Overview

When I consider the term "eccentric", I think of the orbits of comets, irregularly-shaped pearls, and the conversation I had with my ex-employer when our relationship began to deteriorate and she complained that my "eccentricity credits had run out." Four years later, I have to ask: "Can eccentricity credits ever really run out?" Or more importantly, should they? I think not! And I consider it highly irregular of her to think so.

Now—due to the programming efforts of Pacific Film Archive's Steve Seid—to the term "eccentric" I associate cinema. "Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies, 1963–82", currently running at PFA through August 27, 2009, states Seid's case: "Eccentric cinema thrives on pictorial surplus, the indulgent storyline, and a contempt for the customary, all resting upon the sagging shoulders of extravagant skill. This is no trash cinema, with its cheesy topics, uninvited camp, and joyful ineptitude. Instead, eccentricity might show itself as a dizzy disregard for the stuff of genre and style, or in the pursuit of ungainly ideas that consign a filmmaker to the status of outsider. Often the eccentric surfaces early in a career, before the artist has lost the exuberance of youth or succumbed to the timidity of the marketplace."

With "trashy" cinema now popularized and relegated to the academic footnote, eccentric cinema comes along to stake a claim on the side margins, clinging fiercely to that empty space for fear of slipping down to the bottom of the page for enumerated consideration. Steve Seid has constructed a veritable "Noah's Ark of oddities", shepherding two of each kind of subgenre into his confabulated series: "a pair of Westerns in which heroism has gone south; two postapocalyptic tales where virility prevails; dual vampiric accounts that suck, differently; a brace of psychological breakdowns involving mawkish men with issues; a duet of rock musicals that strike discord with their delivery; and a twosome of fantasies about that elusive thing called love, one with a mermaid, the other with a monomaniac." Seid concludes: "Genre meltdowns, faulty parables, self-detonating critiques: these films may not be trash cinema, but they are definitely worth recycling."

I caught the series' first installment Coming Apart (1969) where Rip Torn—in his first starring role as one of the "mawkish men with issues"—"earns his moniker." As Seid writes: "He's ripped and torn and on the way to a big, bawdy breakdown in [Milton Moses] Ginsberg's voyeuristic sex romp. Torn plays Joe Glazer, a psychiatrist whose pent-up proclivities find him moving into a studio apartment in the building where his former mistress (Viveca Lindfors) lives. Once there, he begins a seduction 'experiment' that involves a one-way mirror, a couch, and a procession of sexually apt young women. Succumbing to his own predatory appetite, Joe becomes horrified by the emptiness of his conquests. His comeuppance arrives in the person of a former patient, played by a desperately determined Sally Kirkland, who deflates his fragile fantasy. Scorned at the time of its release, this prodding pic may have captured the painful collapse of sixties counterculture with too much provocation. Filmed entirely from behind the mirror, Ginsberg's frisky fete makes us voyeurs at our own love-in. The eyes have it."

Coming Apart strips away the pleasure of voyeurism to reveal its addictive implication. Seid confirmed this in an email when I complimented him on his introduction: "What I was getting at but never managed to articulate about Coming Apart has to do with the reception of the film. I was referring to the voyeurism as an important theme. What I think riled many critics is not the sometimes gratuitous sexuality, nor its parade of neurotic nudes, but the fact that the film continually implicated the viewer. It seems to me that taboo things fare better when they just appeal to our base instincts. Everyone agrees that we have base instincts and base instincts indulged act as social release valves. But if you somehow complicate the use of base instincts, if you turn the impulse into a critique of abuse or power, then those instincts no longer function as release valves, but as subterfuge. In this context, the baser things critique their own source in culture. They become subversive. Coming Apart continually turns the mechanism of Rip Torn's voyeurism back on the audience. There is that great moment when he is remorseful that he can't turn off the machine even though he knows he must, that he's being self-destructive. But his compulsion is greater (at that moment) than his despair. And we as viewers can't stop watching him and his exploitation. That's just part of the film's intent, but it's pretty good stuff."

When Coming Apart was first released in 1969, Time characterized Joe's "experiment" as "a voyeur's version of Candid Camera. The analyst analyzed, the schizoid psyche caught flagrante delicto—it is a notion worthy of Pirandello or Antonioni. And totally beyond Milton Moses Ginsberg…."

When Time complained that the transvestite character was "presumably added to assure the widest possible audience appeal", they were being condescending of course, though time lends a piquant reading to Joe's latent homosexual impulses, suspected by his peers. Is Coming Apart a misogynistic film? Probably not, though the demarcation is slight. Is Joe a misogynist? Perhaps a self-loathing misogynist: "I hate men, they degrade you for being a female." Is Coming Apart a homophobic film for the way Joe treats the transvestite when his anatomical secret is revealed? Perhaps only in the sense that misogyny has long been credited as the seat of homophobia. Contrary to Time's smarmy insinuation, there is appeal in recovering this transvestite character in '60s cinema for no other reason than it reinforces the project of archiving representation. He's a character consigned to the ranks of some of the minor players in Midnight Cowboy. M.M. Ginsberg has left a time capsule that—no matter how you judge the container—contains some far out stuff from the sixties; perhaps most notably an uncomfortable record of its capsized idealism.

At The New York Times, Vincent Canby noted that—though Rip Torn's character moves the camera several times—"for most of Coming Apart the camera remains focused on the couch and the mirror. As a result, almost every image is half real, half the reverse of reality, which is, I suppose, a legitimate cinematic equivalent of the way one automatically supplements reality with fantasy in conscious experience."

Canby assessed fairly: "The autobiographical film form is ambitious and offers lots of opportunities for fancy effects that try to tell us we're watching captured reality. There are blackouts, when the sound is on and the camera is not; 'whiteouts,' and representations of film leaders, when the camera seems to be running out of film; 'flash frames,' or subliminal shots, when Joe flicks the camera on and off. From time to time, Joe also talks to the camera, but his musings on reality ('All I wanted to do was see, to encounter myself in the midst of my being ...') are as open-ended as the sight of an image receding into the infinity provided by two mirrors.

"Instead, Coming Apart compels attention as an anthology of various types of sexual endeavor, all photographed from the fixed position that in stag films is a matter of economic necessity (each new camera set-up adds more money to the budget) but here is a matter of conscious style." In fact, Canby suggested, "Coming Apart is an unequivocably entertaining movie only if you cherish the rigorous ceremonies enacted by participants in stag movies, photographed with the kind of frontal, skin-blemished candor that shrivels all desire. As an attempt to elevate pornography (or what we thought was pornography until all the points of reference came unstuck) into art, it is often witty and funny but it fails for several reasons, including Ginsberg's self-imposed limitations on form (to which he's not completely faithful)."

Locally, when Coming Apart had a one-week revival run at the Lumiere 10 years ago, Edward Guthmann from the San Francisco Chronicle complained: "The claustrophobic intimacy of Coming Apart is supposed to bring us inside Joe's head to share his agony and self-loathing, one supposes. Instead, the whole set-up of the hidden camera and the mirror—and the implied correlation between psychiatry and voyeurism—feels like a gimmick, an arty pose." (Time likewise criticized that Ginsberg's manifest intent to make his film "a set of X rays" comes off instead as "only a suite of poses.") Guthmann, further contextualizing that 1969 was the year of such films as Easy Rider, Medium Cool and Midnight Cowboy, suggested that—though cultural forms and sexual behavior were being turned inside out and Coming Apart probably had some relevance for some people—"today it looks phony and self-important. It's meant to be unvarnished and truthful but the situation it portrays—of Torn lying back while a series of desperate women throw themselves at him—is pure fantasy, the silly wish fulfillment of a Playboy subscriber."

Meanwhile at The Examiner, Wesley Morris added: "Bizarre, irritating, self-indulgent to the point of narcissism, Coming Apart is a stark, necessary reminder of what kind of actor Torn was when the nature of the work he was doing allowed him to fold a psyche into his particular brand of menace."

More recent critics have found much to recommend the film, though acknowledging it remains very much a product of its time. IndieWIRE crowns it "One of the most challenging, visionary, important films of independent cinema." At A.V. Club Nathan Rabin observes: "Coming Apart's secret-camera gimmick proves tremendously limiting, but it's also an audacious stylistic choice that lends the film a harrowing, claustrophobic intensity that can be almost unbearable." He concludes the film is "disconcertingly original, if self-indulgent and formless. A noble, if not entirely successful, experiment that promises more than it can deliver, it's a fascinating, frustrating time capsule that too often lapses into tedium."

PFA's "Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies, 1963–82" continues this evening with a new print of L.Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975).

Cross-published on Twitch.