Metropolitan was a flattering, made-to-order story in which Tibbett was presented as an American performer, slighted by the Met’s European bias, who triumphs as the headliner of a rival company of native-born singers. In contrast, Under Your Spell, the film Otto was to direct, had a decidedly unfriendly premise. Tibbett appears as a singer with crossover appeal who happily retires, giving up his career for love. Fully aware of Zanuck’s intentions and not blaming Otto for accepting the job, Tibbett was an affable colleague throughout the shooting in August and September 1936. At the end of the day Tibbett would frequently sing for the cast and crew, accompanying himself on a piano. Otto, appreciating the tough spot the singer was in, also behaved beautifully. In a typical press release (on September 23, 1936), Otto was depicted as “the embodiment of Continental courtliness” and so extraordinarily generous that the cast and crew were reluctant to admire “any of the doctor’s possessions.” When Arthur Treacher (playing Tibbett’s butler) admired a striped tie Preminger was wearing, the director took it off on the spot and handed it to the nonplussed actor. When Gregory Ratoff (playing the singer’s agent) admired Preminger’s sweater, Otto pleaded with him to take it. Only once did a trace of Preminger willfulness surface. When Tibbett was scheduled to perform an aria from Gounod’s Faust at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium, Otto refused the request of a group of Tibbett’s opera fans to be cast as audience members.
Instead, Tibbett sang “Le veau d’or” to an audience of expensive dress extras hired by the director.
As he always would, Otto worked efficiently, completing the film well under budget and well before the scheduled deadline. Under Your Spell opened to tepid notices on November 6, 1936, on the bottom half of the bill at the RKO Palace on Broadway. “The direction by Otto Ludwig Preminger is spotty, not overcoming any of the story’s shortcomings,” Variety huffed.10 “Tibbett’s manifest weakness as a screen artist has always been his essential incongruity in the conventional romantic context, and if 20th Fox has not discovered it by this time it deserves the consequences,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his November 6 review in the New York Times, as if on Zanucks orders.
Although intended as Lawrence Tibbett’s swan song, Under Your Spell was also Otto Preminger’s debut, in effect his graduation thesis. The film is a low-grade screwball comedy, a knockoff of It Happened One Night performed by a troupe of lackluster road-company players, and Preminger’s direction is no more than routine. Any competent, second-string studio
“We’re stuck with the son of a bitch,” Zanuck told Otto about Lawrence Tibbett, the star of Under Your Spell, Preminger’s first directing job in America.
Preminger provides a proscenium-like frame for the singing star Lawrence Tibbett (Arthur Treacher plays the butler) in Under Your Spell.
employee could have done as well. Toiling at the bottom of the Fox factory after having headed the prestigious Theater in der Josefstadt, Preminger may have experienced a twinge of identification with the plight of his star, a celebrated opera singer stuck in a trifling B movie. But if Otto did feel he was working beneath his station, he wisely never let on. He recognized what Zanuck wanted from him: proof that the “distinguished Dr. Preminger from Vienna” could play by the rules of the Hollywood system.
Surely, however, Zanuck took notice that in two sequences the novice director demonstrates a rapport with a new medium. The first is a long tracking shot that opens the film in which an inquisitive moving camera surveys a recording studio. The scene begins with a close-up of a record playing on a turntable, after which the camera begins a slow, circular movement around the room. It focuses first on an orchestra, then on the reactions of two listeners, the agent and the butler of the singer, and settles finally on the source of the sound, the singing star himself, in the process of recording the title song. Here, as he will throughout his career, Preminger favors camera movement—the gliding, peering camera in one unbroken stride binding together all the elements of the scene—over montage, a succession of separate shots. The second sequence in which the film snaps briskly to attention is in a courtroom, which Preminger presents as a beehive of overlapping dialogue. Lawyers argue back and forth as an exasperated judge bangs his gavel. It’s clear that for Preminger a courtroom is a privileged place, and the scene has a vibrancy unmatched by anything else in the film.
Otto, proving to Zanuck’s satisfaction that he was not a rebellious European hotshot, graduated. Zanuck promoted him to the A-list, assigning him a story called Nancy Steele Is Missing, which was to star Wallace Beery, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Champ and had had major roles in two recent hits, Grand Hotel and Tugboat Annie. But Beery never showed up. Zanuck’s emissary, Gregory Ratoff, brought Otto the bad news: “Beery won’t do the picture with you. He says he won’t make a film with a director whose name he can’t pronounce.”11 Preminger surely was spared. There was no way he could have gotten along with the famously cantankerous Beery.
Zanuck bumped Otto back to the B unit to direct a fast-talking comedy called Danger—Love at Work. If there had been a certain logic in Zanuck’s choice of the cultivated young European to direct a film starring an opera singer, this assignment was a mismatch. With his still tentative command of English, Otto couldn’t hope to get the hang of the script’s fast-paced, vernacular idiom. Compounding the damage was Zanuck’s puzzling choice for leading lady: Simone Simon, just arrived from Paris, with an accent as thick as her director’s. Preposterously, Simon would be playing an American character (it was Zanuck’s intention to account for her accent with the alibi that she had been educated in Paris). Although Otto politely challenged Zanuck’s casting, the mogul, with a lifelong soft spot for French starlets less enticing on screen than in his boudoir, would not relent. Preminger tried to smooth the rough edges of Simon’s fractured English, but surely this was a case of the blind leading the blind. After watching the first few days’ rushes Zanuck had to face facts: Simone Simon was lost in translation.
According to Preminger, Zanuck dismissed the actress with the kind of zinger Otto himself was to become famous for: “You have no talent whatever. Go back to Paris.”12 (Before returning to France, however, Simon in 1936 and 1937 made four minor films at Twentieth Century-Fox. She was to have a second chance in Hollywood in the 1940s at RKO, where her most famous roles were in The Cat People [1942] and The Curse of the Cat People [1944].)
Otto wasn’t quite as lucky as Simon: Zanuck kept him on the job, with Ann Sothern replacing the French actress. As he was filming over the summer, Markus and Josefa visited Otto, who was an attentive host, inviting his parents to see him at work on the set at Fox and showing them the sights of Los Angeles. He took them to the finest restaurants and on trips to Palm Springs and Lake Arrowhead, all the while imploring them to leave Vienna. Otto was more certain than ever that it would soon be impossible for any Jew to survive in Austria. He urged his parents to obtain immigration visas, but Markus refused. “He was convinced that I was mistaken, and [he] felt that it was wrong and unpatriotic for a prominent Austrian to show such lack of confidence in the future of his country.”13 Refusing to give up, Otto promised his parents a good life in America, but Markus was as stubborn as his son; for prominent Jews, he assured Otto, life in Vienna would continue to be safe. When his parents left after a visit of three weeks, Otto was fearful that he might not see his beloved father or mother again.
It was hard for Otto to give his full attention to the minor film he was working on. But professional as ever, he persevered. Danger—Love at Work has a slight but workable premise—a lawyer must persuade eight members of an eccentric rich family to agree to hand over land left them by their grandfather to a corporation for development. However, instead of exploring the potentially engaging social themes implicit in the material— capitalist excess, the growing division between haves and have-nots in Depression America—the film reduces its focus to the oddball family. Held up for light comic ridicule are a tiny, meek paterfamilias, his dithering wife, a so
n who paints on windows, a child prodigy, two maiden sisters who ward off intruders with a shotgun rigged to go off when their doorbell rings, and an uncle who lives in a cave and dresses in early Cro-Magnon.
Reviews of this disposable boulevard fare, released on September 30, 1937, were surprisingly pleasant. “Not important enough to be a main feature but a very good dualer,” Variety noted, adding that “it is old farcical stuff but well executed and well directed so that it is still very funny”14 In a clear-eyed postmortem, however, Preminger dismissed the film as “just part of my schooling. My English was so spotty I didn’t know whether the actors were speaking their lines or talking politics with me.” He recognized that he “needed to know more about America before he tried to interpret it on the screen.”15
Darryl Zanuck, however, had a different reaction. Appreciating Preminger’s handling of group shots in which characters jabber at the same time and a beautifully lighted scene in which the romantic couple are
From early on, as in this nine-character setup in Danger—Love at Work, the group shot was a Preminger specialty.
caught in a barn during a rainstorm, he offered Otto a new two-year contract. From Zanuck’s point of view, Preminger had twice proven to be a willing foot soldier. And on a personal level, Zanuck enjoyed Preminger’s European flair. He began to favor Otto and Marion with invitations to parties in his homes in Santa Monica and Palm Springs, and at the studio he frequently asked Preminger to join him for lunch or dinner in the executive dining room. Other studio employees, as alert as Otto to the politics of power that fueled the system, also read the signs: clearly the newcomer had become a court favorite.
In November 1937, Zanuck’s perennial emissary Gregory Ratoff brought Preminger the news that Zanuck had chosen him to direct Kidnapped, the most expensive feature to date in the studio’s history. Zanuck himself had adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, set in the Scottish Highlands, and was also planning to produce. Otto had never heard of the novel, and after he read Zanuck’s script he knew he was in trouble. Once again, Zanuck’s pairing of director to material was odd, and in this case perverse. Could his reasoning have been that a foreign director would have an affinity for a story with a foreign setting? Otto informed Ratoff that he could not possibly accept the assignment—“all I knew about the Scots was that they wore kilts,” he claimed.16 But Ratoff warned him that if he turned Zanuck down, he risked demotion, even possible banishment. When Otto wouldn’t budge, the excitable Ratoff broke down in wrenching sobs, pounding his chest as he pleaded with Otto to accept the job. Reluctantly, Otto yielded.
With less time for preparation than he had had on either of his first two films, Preminger started to shoot a story set in a backlot re-creation of Scotland that he simply did not understand or have any feeling for. It was Zanuck’s practice to watch the dailies on every production, but because he was in New York for a stockholders’ meeting when Otto began filming Kidnapped, several days of dailies had accumulated. When he screened Otto’s footage as soon as he returned, he was unhappy. The work was stilted, and it was clear to Zanuck that Preminger had not been able to win the trust of the child actor, Freddie Bartholomew, who was playing Stevenson’s young hero. Zanuck called Otto to his office, where he accused the director of making changes in a scene between Bartholomew and a dog. Otto, composed at first, said he shot the scene exactly as it was in the script. Zanuck, insisting he knew his own script, disagreed. Otto repeated that he had made no changes whatever. The argument escalated. Zanuck raised his voice and his height, pulling himself up to confront his massive adversary. And then, perhaps for the first time in America, Otto had one of his tantrums. The veins in his neck started to throb; his head and face were overtaken by a fire-alarm red; his voice rose to ear-splitting volume. In recalling the incident Preminger liked to speculate that Zanuck’s anger rose as “he began to suspect he was mistaken.”17 Zanuck, who was certainly no slouch in a temper roller derby but probably could not have matched Preminger, commanded his employee to leave the office. Otto, fuming, left quickly, slamming the door to Zanuck’s office on his way out. “If you don’t patch this up with Zanuck you’ll never again work anywhere in Hollywood,” Gregory Ratoff warned, again bursting into tears.18 Otto at first was unconcerned, choosing to regard Ratoff’s predictions as the ravings of a natural-born hysteric.
In the hermetic studio enclave, news of Preminger’s encounter with Zanuck spread quickly, and Otto began to notice a rapid change in the temperature. Beginning to feel uneasy, he turned to his mentor, Joe Schenck, who had professed lifelong devotion, assuring Otto that he regarded him as the son he didn’t have. Otto called Schenck’s office, fully assuming that his “father,” who was also the cofounder of the studio, would intercede on his behalf. But Schenck did not return any of the more than a dozen calls that Otto made. Banned from the executive dining room, Otto ate alone in the commissary, shunned by colleagues. Ratoff would speak to him only outside the studio. The lock to Otto’s office was changed and his name was removed from the door. After his parking space was relocated to a remote spot, he stopped going to the studio. At that point, a Zanuck intermediary offered Preminger a buyout deal, which he rejected: he wanted to be paid for the eleven months remaining on the two-year contract he had signed. He began to look for work at other studios, but received no offers. In the winter of 1937, two years after his arrival in Los Angeles, Otto Preminger had to confront the fact that he had become unemployable.
Rebuffed for perhaps the first time in his life, Otto did not cave in. As he continued to collect his salary he enrolled in courses in American history at UCLA. Under an assumed name he also began to audit a drama course, but when the teacher discovered who Otto was he “threw me out because he thought I was spying,” as Preminger recalled.19 He also began to explore opportunities in local theater. In this winter of his discontent, he asked Luise Rainer, then at the peak of a remarkably short-lived Hollywood career, to appear in a play he would direct. “All I remember is that I did not want to do it,” Rainer recalled. Assessing the man who had directed her in Vienna in Men in White only three years earlier, Rainer did not care for what she saw. “Some people are what they look like. What did he look like? He looked like a man with a certain amount of hardness. A man who wants to get what he wants to get.”20
At the time, Max Reinhardt was also in Hollywood, but there is no evidence that Preminger sought out his former mentor, who also was not thriving. After he had codirected, with his former Josefstadt protégé Wilhelm Dieterle, a 1935 film of his favorite play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Reinhardt had had no further offers. And as both he and his slightly embarrassed American hosts were only too well aware, in Hollywood the great impresario of the European theater was out of his element. With no other visible means of support, Reinhardt had opened a school, the Max Reinhardt School for the Theatre, where conceivably Preminger could have been employed. But the proud and temporarily humbled young man did not, and perhaps could not, ask for a job there.
If by temperament and artistic inclination Reinhardt and Luise Rainer were ill suited to Hollywood, Preminger decidedly was not. He was tough and practical in ways that the industry both understood and rewarded, and unlike his former Viennese compatriots he disparaged neither the products nor the business practices of the commercial American filmmaking establishment. But the scene in Zanuck’s office had sidelined him, at least for the moment. After months of batting his considerable head against tightly closed doors—at one low point he even offered his services as a director of screen tests—he realized that his only chance for rehabilitation would be in the place where he had launched his career in America: on Broadway.
But before he was free to relocate to New York he had to face another crisis, one far more threatening than his interrupted career. On March 12, 1938, an event occurred that Otto had foreseen but that many Austrian Jews including his parents and his brother had failed to anticipate: Hitler, a native son, invaded Austria. Following the Anschluss, Austr
ia was subject to the same racial laws as Germany, which meant that every single Jewish person was in immediate mortal peril. When he was unable to reach his family for a forty-eight-hour period following the Anschluss, Otto became alarmed. Finally receiving a phone call from his father—the elder Premingers, having barely managed to escape, were in Zurich—Otto was profoundly relieved. By means of prominent connections Markus had been able to secure two seats on a train from Vienna to Italy; but the borders were already closed and the train was rerouted back to Vienna. Desperate, and now finally and fully aware that he and Josefa were facing extermination, Markus, as Otto recounted the events, “appealed for help to an old friend, the Chief of Police in Vienna, Otto Skubl. At great risk to himself he put my parents on a plane to Zurich.”21
Ingo amplified the narrative of his parents’ escape. “My father was stupid enough to think he could stay on after March 12, 1938,” he recalled. “He had a foolish optimism: ‘It won’t be so terrible,’ he said. He felt, because of his position, ‘it was going to be all right.’ But of course it wasn’t going to be all right.” With his wife Kate and young daughter Eve, Ingo, who at the time of the Anschluss was a successful lawyer living on the same street as Freud, made a hasty and narrow escape from Vienna to Zurich. “I spent hours crying on the phone, begging my father to leave Vienna, and even then, he said he wouldn’t leave.” Eventually Ingo prevailed, and “at the last moment that it was possible for Otto Skubl to help them,” Markus and Josefa left Vienna to join Ingo and his family in Zurich.22
When the Premingers were reunited in Switzerland they had to confront the fact that they were unlikely to find a safe haven anywhere in Europe. Otto, of course, wanted his entire family with him in America. “Everybody wanted to go to the United States,” Ingo recalled.
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