Maybe it’s hard to recall now, in our niche-marketed age of YouTube auteurs, but there was a time when Hollywood directors owned popular personas that were more akin to what culture today expects from hip-hop stars.

Indeed, the phrase “notorious big” would fit Otto Preminger perfectly, although the prolific filmmaker (37 movies in 48 years) and sometime actor had a few alter-egos of his own: “the man you love to hate” (after Erich Von Stroheim), Mr. Freeze (the climate-altering supervillain he played in a 1966 episode of TV’s “Batman”), and Herr Commandant (Col. von Scherbach in Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17,” in which the Austrian Jew gave a defining, campy performance as a Nazi). Like two other larger-than-life directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Preminger enjoyed a colorful profile that existed well beyond his work onscreen.

Unfortunately, that public image has lingered more vividly than much of Preminger’s oeuvre, which included musicals, a whole body of films noir, war movies, old-school epics, melodramas, and even — atypically — a comedy. Unlike Welles or Hitchcock, this consummate professional has rarely been much of a critic’s darling. His reputation suffered from a long creative decline that began after his last success, 1965’s “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” even as his work notably inspired a generation of brash former movie critics who launched the nouvelle vague.

So, yes, the French loved Preminger, especially for giving them Jean Seberg and “Bonjour Tristesse” (1958). But who else?

“I don’t get ulcers. I cause them,” Preminger liked to say, so perhaps the lack of latter-day appreciation for the director, who died in 1986 at the age of 81, is a bit of karmic retribution for all the actors he scandalously terrorized. The wheel turns in January at Film Forum, which begins the new year (Wednesday, to be precise) with a 23-film Preminger retrospective.

There are the obvious winners, like “Laura” (1944), “Fallen Angel” (1954), and “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), the latter boasting those groundbreaking title graphics by Saul Bass and a pulse-racing Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn score — the first time jazz had been employed for a complete movie soundtrack. But there also are plenty of unusual titles, the kind that lurk in the shadows of 3 a.m. cable channel schedules, sich as the pulpy romantic morality play “Forever Amber” (1947), in which forbidden passion rages while the Black Plague ravages London in 1665, and “The Cardinal” (1963), half-forgotten today even though it garnered a best director Oscar nomination for Preminger, and an occasion for the director to anatomize the Catholic Church in one of his signature “institutional” dramas — see also, “Advise and Consent” (1962) and “Exodus” (1960).

The misunderstood master gets a comprehensive, and largely sympathetic, treatment from biographer Foster Hirsch, whose recently published “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King” (Knopf) argues for the director as a supreme stylist and savvy cultural brinksman whose strengths abide. Contemporary audiences numbed by what Mr. Hirsch calls “shrapnel cutting” will find in even the least of Preminger’s films a bounty of nuanced rhythms, cultivated dialogue, and gracefully gliding cameras — not to mention a sophisticated moral dimension that eschews easy definitions of good and evil.

“He was a master of the mise-en-scene,” Mr. Hirsch said. “He hated close-ups, and felt that every cut was an interruption. He loved dialogue. His movies really were ‘talking pictures.'” Mr. Hirsch, a Brooklyn College professor and film historian who will introduce several of Film Forum’s screenings, also takes time to illustrate just how ironic Preminger’s performance as a Nazi was. Again and again, Preminger took on the powers-that-be, hiring the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, repeatedly defying would-be censors and busting the Motion Picture Production Code by introducing explicit references to homosexuality (in “Advise and Consent”), and promoting the careers of black actors — including that of his onetime lover Dorothy Dandridge, the star of “Carmen Jones” (1954) and a long-absent 1959 “Porgy and Bess” that could not be secured for the retrospective but will see eventual DVD release.

Preminger always brought his pictures in on time and under budget, yet entertained lavishly and promoted even his most dismal flops with grand aplomb, regardless of reviews or backlash.

“He was a very complicated man, an ambiguous figure,” Mr. Hirsch said. “And he loved ambiguity in his films. His reputation as an ogre and a tyrant is not the entire picture of the man. He was an almost novelistic character. He hated hams, but he was a ham.”

Mr. Hirsch isn’t the only scholar assessing Preminger’s merits. Chris Fujiwara’s “The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger” (Faber and Faber) is due in March, promising a deeper focus on film aesthetics to complement Mr. Hirsch’s mountains of anecdotal detail. As Mr. Fujiwara quite accurately summarizes: “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.”

Through January 17 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).