LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Otto Preminger: Films
built 618 days ago
Otto Preminger's 1958 Bonjour Tristesse — one of the masterworks of the period — used the relatively new format of CinemaScope to present its five characters in various tableaux. CinemaScope was often used with subjects almost absurdly well suited to the screen's shape: one of the first such pictures was a submarine movie. But Preminger uses it in this film to depict ambiguous, shifting relationships in a tale of conflicting obsessions. Unavailable in its original form for decades, the film has recently been restored and is being shown here once, on Thursday, September 30, at the Film Center.
Source:
This classic psychological thriller from Otto Preminger stars Carol Lynley as Ann Lake, a single mom who has just moved to London with her young daughter, Bunny. When she arrives to pick Bunny up from nursery school, she finds that her daughter has vanished without a trace. Laurence Olivier turns in a stellar performance as the police chief. Moodily atmospheric in black and white, a surreal pitch is achieved in the film's depiction of the dark underbelly of London and the eccentric characters who populate it.
Source:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented a centennial tribute to three-time Academy Award-nominated director and producer Otto Preminger on November 2, 2006, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Academy Past President Richard Kahn, pictured here, introduced the evening. Kahn was a marketing executive at Columbia Pictures and was directly involved with five of Preminger's films: "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958), "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "Advise and Consent" (1962), "The Cardinal" (1963) and "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965).
Source:
Set on the French Riviera, Otto Preminger's film concerns a wealthy Frenchman (David Niven) who openly cavorts with his mistress, under the watchful eye of his 17-year-old daughter, Cecile. Cecile embarks on her own steamy affair with a boy named Phillipe. But when Cecile's straight-laced godmother (Deborah Kerr) expresses disapproval toward the girl's fling, Cecile devises a scheme to drive her godmother away.
Source:
Preminger expected that acclaim for Laura would promote him to work on better pictures, but his professional fate was in the hands of Darryl Zanuck. Instead of the kind of plum he was certainly justified in expecting, Zanuck had Preminger take over for the ailing Ernst Lubitsch, who had recently suffered a heart attack, on A Royal Scandal, a remake of Lubitsch's own 1924 silent Forbidden Paradise, starring Pola Negri as Catherine the Great. Before his heart attack, Lubitsch had spent months in preparation on the film, and had already casted the film. Otto, who had known Tallulah Bankhead before the start of the Nazi invasion into Austra, could not have gotten along better with his new leading lady. The two further bonded in part of their heavy dislike towards Anne Baxter, cast as a lady-in-waiting and the Empress's romantic rival. Baxter assumed a grand manner that rubbed them the wrong way.
Source:
Preminger concentrated the action of his film into a three month period. Some of the events which did in fact take place and which are presented in the film actually occured out of the time framework adopted. For example, the bombing of the southern wing of the Kind David Hotel took place on July 22sc 1946 and the spectacular escape of Irgun terrorists from Acco prison on May 4th 1947. The film documents how the flight of Holocaust survivors from Europe translated into the powerful movement for return to Palestine and into the lands' claims of a legitimate national people. While Preminger was shooting the film in 1960, the previous illegal immigration into Palestine, which he filmed as an heroic act of foundation against British Mandate rule, was declared the lawful right of return by the new state. The Exodus, once a return from slavery and presently a return of Holocaust survivors, would from now on determine the Israelis' right to statehood.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Films