Wunderkind In Wonderland
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In his 1977 autobiography, the exiled Viennese film director and actor Otto Preminger, born 1905, presented himself as a wunderkind from the Old World capital at the Danube. He cultivated that image so aggressively that he changed his birthplace from a village in Bukovina, one of the Polish provinces under Austrian administration, to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, listing two sets of birth certificates with conflicting information and denying his Eastern European Jewish roots.
With the subtitle of his comprehensive new biography, “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King” (Knopf, 592 pages, $35), the Brooklyn College film historian Foster Hirsch leads readers to expect a revision of the related legend of “Otto the Terrible,” a legend that has shadowed the career of this masterful filmmaker since his arrival in Hollywood. As a director, Preminger was most well known for a personality trait he shared with some fellow exile directors, including Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder: a tendency for temper tantrums. Actors called him a dictator or, even worse, a Nazi. His tantrums were probably a defense mechanism, but they nonetheless served his cultivated public persona as a great talent who demanded perfection.
Preminger was among the legendary German-speaking directors who immigrated to Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. The initial wave of European film professionals arrived in the 1920s to participate in the international production of silent movies, and included names such as Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, and Erich von Stroheim. The second group came after 1933, when Jews were driven out of Germany. Among them were Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak. The last group to arrive was driven out of Europe between the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the defeat of France in 1940.
Preminger did not belong to any of these groups, as he arrived from Vienna in 1935 with invitations to work in New York and Los Angeles, leaving on his own terms after a farewell production of his own choosing at the theater that he had managed. The political situation in Austria in 1935, though not as threatening to Jews as in Germany, was deteriorating under Austro-fascism: Parliament was abolished, and, in 1934, political parties were outlawed. In 1938, the Viennese welcomed Hitler to their city.
America was Preminger’s wonderland. Although he had studied English for only six months before he arrived, he immediately fit right in. Preminger was enthusiastic about America and its democratic institutions, and when he became an American citizen in 1943 he called it one of the proudest days of his life. Throughout his time in America, he nevertheless continued to cultivate his self-image as Viennese wunderkind, with his Old World gallantry and baronial habit of womanizing (he was married three times and had a son out of wedlock with Gypsy Rose Lee). And yet, he expressed no nostalgia about Austria, especially after the Anschluss, when he was barely able to save his family from the Holocaust.
Despite his struggles with English, Preminger’s theater production in New York was a success, and although he had hardly any experience in film directing, he completed his first movie for Twentieth-Century Fox in 1936: “Under Your Spell,” a second-rate comedy with a singing star who had lost his screen appeal. Preminger did not earn any special laurels for his debut, but demonstrated one talent that was tremendously valued at Fox: He completed the film under budget and before the scheduled deadline. This talent became a signature feature of Preminger’s productions and made him an invaluable director within the studio system.
Despite his infamous outbursts, Preminger never played the maverick director, but rather made himself indispensable to studio expectations. This did not prevent him, however, from losing his job after a clash with Darryl F. Zanuck in 1937. For five years thereafter Preminger made his living as director and actor, playing mostly Nazi characters, mostly on the New York stage. (He revived one of these roles in Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17,” the performance for which he is probably best remembered.) It was a bitter irony that German-speaking exile actors in New York and Hollywood had to play the Nazis from whom they had just escaped.
When the studio rehired him in 1942 — Zanuck was out of town on a film assignment for the Department of War — Preminger demonstrated that he had learned his lesson. For the next 10 years, Preminger accepted all assignments, even B-movies, and rescued projects that other directors had rejected or were unable to complete, among them a few Ernst Lubitsch films. But by 1952, he realized that his service as a good citizen had done little for his reputation and he decided to try his luck as an independent producer and director. It was his masterful films from between 1953 and 1963 that established his reputation: “The Moon is Blue” (1953), “Carmen Jones” (1954), “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955), “Porgy and Bess” (1959), and finally “Exodus” (1960). As independent producer and director, Preminger was able to select controversial topics that were too risky for the studios. He did not have a signature visual style, but followed the classical Hollywood format, defined by centered compositions and unobtrusive camera work. What distinguished these films, indeed what made them essential, was Preminger’s willingness to court controversy by addressing contemporary issues head-on. Mr. Hirsch calls it Preminger’s “Declaration of Independence.”
There were 10 more Preminger films to follow after “Exodus,” but they do not match the success of his movies of that decade. His stature as a filmmaker was enhanced by his stance on issues such a censorship, drug addiction, employment of black performers in the 1950s, and the Hollywood blacklist. (He gave screenplay credits to Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten.) In 1953, Preminger refused to delete some words deemed immoral by the Motion Picture Production Code from his film “The Moon Is Blue.” With a Supreme Court decision in his favor, he liberated American mainstream filmmaking from the narrow-minded dictates of the Code.
Without doubt, Preminger was one of the great masters of American filmmaking. Mr. Hirsch confirms this assessment at great length but, despite devoting considerable space to it, he leaves the crucial issue of Preminger’s unruly behavior unresolved. Were the tantrums a tool to get a better performance out of his actors, or were they part of an irrational behavior that was beyond his control? Mr. Hirsch’s incurious presentation on this point does not help the reader to understand the enigma of the Viennese wunderkind with the demeanor of a Prussian officer. Was it a persona that Preminger consciously created, or was he a victim of his Viennese superego? Preminger’s personality perfectly matched the work ethic of filmmaking in terms of deadlines and budget expenses, but this does not explain the courageous production of “Porgy and Bess,” his daring, all-black version of Bizet’s “Carmen,” or his epic film about the founding of the state of Israel. These works show the distance that he traveled from his arrival in New York in 1935. His son thought that Preminger’s life was a successful escape from the self-image of his Viennese childhood, saying, in a telling final tribute: “He loved the fact that he was an American and not an Austrian.”
Mr. Bahr, author of “Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007), is professor emeritus of German at the University of California, Los Angeles.