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Otto Preminger: Foster Hirsch
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Preminger liked to buy successful, unwieldy novels such as Advise and Consent and rebuild them as character studies — intelligent films built around the shell of melodrama. He made, Hirsch says, “thoughtful, challenging films on a broad range of subjects that continue to matter.”
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Still, as in the movies, legend trumps reality, and it is Otto the Ogre who dominates much of "Otto Preminger," Foster Hirsch's earnest, sympathetic, but rather pedestrian biography. Particularly toward the end, it becomes a numbing recital of major quarrels (with, among others, Tom Tryon, Faye Dunaway and Dyan Cannon) and minor grace notes, usually achieved with actors who relied on that most basic tactic for dealing with bullies: standing up to them.
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If there is a signature Preminger genre, it may be the well-crafted legal melodrama. As his father had commanded crowd-drawing trials in Vienna, so Preminger exuded an autocratic style that adroitly marshaled large ensemble casts in such procedurals as "Anatomy of a Murder" and "Advise & Consent" (1962). Hirsch's treatment, based on myriad interviews, might have suited him. "Otto Preminger" approaches oral history; it's a smart tactic for a subject "who hardly wrote a letter in his life."
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Foster Hirsch