Preminger, regarding himself as no more than a hired hand, completed the film on January 5, a few days ahead of schedule. But the joyless atmosphere on the set is reflected in the film, easily the most leaden in the Preminger canon. The original fault, however, must be attributed to Lubitsch. Under his direction the film certainly would have been jauntier, slyer, and the rites of seduction would have been conducted with a greater playfulness. Preminger, to be sure, does what he can to drain the material of vivacity, but it’s hard to see how the film could ever have been a winner. In casting all-American Betty as a patriot who outsmarts foreign invaders, Lubitsch may have intended his romp as a metaphor for the recent American victory in the war, but if so he chose the wrong star. Grable with her tinny, vapid voice and slovenly diction exudes a common touch that trounces Lubitsch’s famously refined one. When the film opened to moderate business on July 15, 1948, it received better notices than it deserved as reviewers scrambled to discern traces of Lubitsch’s hand. But Nicola Lubitsch had the right idea: “Grable was terrible, the film was terrible, and it should have been abandoned after my father died.”28 Otto’s assessment of That Lady in Ermine was that he “finished it—that was it.”29
On January 12, 1948, a week after Otto completed That Lady in Ermine, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that Preminger had asked Marion for a divorce. “Last year, Mrs. Preminger in Mexico asked Otto for a divorce so she could marry Alex Wennergren, but his wife refused,” Parsons wrote, bringing her readers up to date. “A few months later Mrs. Preminger returned to Hollywood and Otto and nothing more was said about the divorce,” Parsons continued. “The pending divorce will be amicable. Mrs. Preminger several months ago went to Budapest to visit her family. They have all gone to Romania, where she has a home.”
At the same time that Preminger was formally ending his marriage, his affair with Natalie Draper also unraveled, in an encounter at Le Papillon, a fashionable restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. There were conflicting reports about what took place, but apparently Otto became jealous when he saw Natalie at the restaurant with a date, screenwriter Ivan Goff In an interview in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on January 13, Natalie recalled that “on this occasion Otto came over to the bar, kissed my hand, then slapped Ivan without a word.” “There was no such incident,” Preminger contended. Goff’s recollection was that “there were a few hot words, but no blows were struck. We cooled off.” The next day in the same newspaper Goff offered another version of the encounter. “I rose from my seat and propelled my fist three times into what might have been a face.” “Natalie is embarrassed,” her mother reported in the same article. “She told me Ivan had hit Mr. Preminger in self-defense, and that Ivan acted like a perfect gentleman.” “Otto Preminger and I went together for a long time,” Draper herself explained. “He wants me to marry him and has asked his estranged wife for a divorce. But I don’t want any part of him. He’s enraged with jealousy. He doesn’t like anyone I go out with.” Summoning an Old World gallantry after the fact, Otto, who never claimed to have proposed to Natalie, said he refused “to take the matter seriously. I wish to make no statement that would involve a lady, and particularly a lady that has been my friend.” After the incident, however, whether or not blows had been struck, Natalie was a friend no longer.
When Marion returned from Romania in February, the Premingers didn’t bother to keep up appearances. As divorce proceedings dragged on— the divorce was not final until August 25, 1949—they continued to reside at 333 Bel-Air Road but did not cohost parties or go together as a couple to restaurants and industry gatherings. Their estrangement was final, but it was not bitter. And, as always, Otto had the support of his family, who had appreciated Marion’s “flair” and her social skills but had never fully accepted her. For a family man like Otto, surrounded by the enduring marriages of his parents and his brother, this was a difficult time. Now in his mid-forties, he may well have wondered if he would ever have other children besides the son he had had with Gypsy Rose Lee, or if, with his volatile temperament, he would ever be able to sustain a lasting relationship.
Meanwhile, his professional status also seemed to be coming apart. For many months after he finished the Lubitsch assignment, Otto, preoccupied with negotiating the terms of his divorce, seemed to flounder, his name attached to a number of projects that were never produced. Finally, in late spring he began to work on a screenplay that would make it into production, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1897 play Lady Windermere’s Fan, about a woman with a past, the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne, who is redeemed when she prevents her married daughter Lady Windermere (who does not know that Mrs. Erlynne is her mother) from running off with a roué. Preminger’s standing was still secure enough for him to be able to persuade Zanuck to let him produce and direct a period piece based on a literary classic that could not possibly have seemed at the time to be a good commercial bet. That Zanuck approved not only attests to his artistic integrity, it also reveals the flexibility of the studio system itself. Built into the factory production mode was the possibility of making the occasional coterie project such as the version of Wilde’s play that Preminger was planning.
To help him with the adaptation Otto selected an odd duo, his Bel-Air Road neighbor Walter Reisch, noted for his generosity and goodwill, and Dorothy Parker, the acidulous New York wit. Added to the mix was Ross Evans, a studio writer. Preminger’s intention was to transform Wilde’s brilliant but unstable play part nineteenth-century melodrama, part coruscating drawing-room comedy of manners, into a fluent, modern film. He and his writers faced major challenges. Despite his epigrams and his apparent insouciance, Wilde was dedicated to the importance of being earnest about preserving the British class system—for the playwright, as for most of his characters, a frivolous surface conceals a conservative heart. As a result, Wilde’s wit is devoted to keeping in place a system of values most audiences in “classless” America would be unlikely to embrace. Further, with its manifold contrivances, Wilde’s playmaking exudes a musty aroma that any contemporary film would have to dispel. Was Preminger once again, as with That Lady in Ermine, taking on a project certain to fail?
As he hammered out a screenplay with his three able writers, Otto approached Oscar Wilde fearlessly, without any regard for the sanctity of the original text. His goal, however, was not to dismember a work he greatly admired but rather to ease its transition into a new medium. Over the spring and early summer of 1948 he was renovating Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan into The Fan, a film to be produced and directed by Otto Preminger, take it or leave it.
At this point in his career, Wilde’s play was a strategically unwise and perhaps even perverse choice for Preminger. Since Ernst Lubitsch in 1925 had directed a brilliant silent version of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Otto for the third time would be setting himself up in a contest with Lubitsch he was destined to lose. Preminger respected Lubitsch’s straight-faced treatment of the play as a high melodrama that endorses the strict social codes by which the British upper crust secures its power. But with justice he felt that a silent version of Wilde could hardly be the last word, and he was convinced that his was a fresh approach rather than a reworking of Lubitsch’s.
Otto began production with his usual ebullience, certain that the screenplay he had supervised had conquered all the obvious obstacles. As Virginia McDowall (cast as Lady Agatha, the daughter of an acid-tongued society dowager) recalled, Preminger
behaved himself and there was a good feeling on the set. It wasn’t the family feeling I had while working on How Green Was My Valley with John Ford, but it was a nice experience for all of us. I wasn’t afraid of Otto—I had worked for Cecil B. DeMille for five years and I hadn’t been afraid of him either. The way Otto worked was that we had rehearsals before the shots, rather than before the film started shooting. It was a good cast, and though Otto’s relations with Martita Hunt, who played my mother and who had a “rep,” as Otto certainly did, were sometimes strained, there were no
explosions. The only real tension came from George Sanders [playing the disruptive rake, Lord Darlington, who tries to seduce Lady Windermere away from her husband], who was a strange man and not friendly to anyone. He was bored, and seemed so lonely. Otto was always kind to him, however. And he was really lovely with Jeanne Crain [Lady Windermere], who had a natural elegance that was right for the part, and Madeleine Carroll [Mrs. Erlynne]—I remembered her with Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda: heaven!30
Preminger shot quickly, from July 7 to August 18, 1948, and brought the film in several hundred dollars under the $1.5 million budget. But about halfway through, for the only time in his career, he lost his confidence. He began to question both his screenplay and his direction. He didn’t think he had the right touch for mixing the work’s disparate tones of melodrama and comedy of manners, and he was convinced the film would be poorly reviewed and attended. “It was a mistake on my part to have remade the play,” he said, looking back. “Whatever I did to the film was wrong. It is one of the few pictures I disliked while I was making it.”31 Virginia McDowall agreed.
I felt at the time, and I still think so, that Zanuck was out of his mind to allow Otto Preminger to direct Oscar Wilde. Otto didn’t have the delicacy for it. But if he had doubts as we were shooting, he never let on. Not for a moment. He always behaved professionally. And at the end, when he hosted a party for us at a swank restaurant, he kept up the pretense. He was oh so charming that night, and Martita, with whom he had had some friction, was charming too. She was terribly ugly, but that night she was being very hostessy she was dressed beautifully, and she was delightful. If Otto thought the film was not a success—and he must have known, we all felt it—he did not let on.32
As Preminger fully expected, The Fan opened to withering notices. “Except for a wonderful portrayal of the Duchess of Berwick by Martita Hunt, the work has been drained of all Wilde’s wit, style, and period color, and all of Wilde’s defects as a dramatist are rudely underlined,” huffed Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune on April 7, 1949. Apart from Preminger’s early B projects, The Fan, branded with a malodorous reputation, remains the most obscure work of the director’s career. It is also Preminger’s most underrated film and richly deserving of reassessment.
As Lubitsch had, Preminger emphasizes Wilde’s melodrama over his social comedy and refuses to regard Wilde’s conservative ideology as either quaint or irrelevant. Having decided to tell Wilde’s story as a memory piece set in a frame within the frame, Preminger opens the film in postwar London at an auction where the incriminating fan that Lady Windermere left at Lord Darlington’s the night she almost ran off with him is to be sold. An elderly woman, Mrs. Erlynne, comes forward to claim the fan, and a kindly auctioneer allows her twenty-four hours to prove that the fan is hers. When she revisits Lord Darlington’s residence, Mrs. Erlynne encounters the elderly roué and the two survivors begin to reminisce (we learn that Lord and Lady Windermere died when a bomb ripped through their town house during the Blitz). At that point the film segues into the past, adhering to the general outlines of Wilde’s play Tampering with Wilde’s structure may have been literary heresy (of a kind Preminger never hesitated to commit), but the framing device proves effective—presented as memory, Wilde’s old-fashioned storytelling is softened. Setting the action in the past, in effect a “foreign” country with a set of social rules different from those of the present, endows it with an almost Proustian poignancy.
Throughout, Preminger and his Laura cinematographer Joseph La Shelle indicate transitions from present to past by elegant, sweeping pan shots. For the crowded party scenes, they use deep focus and swirling camera movement. But the visual ingenuity would be no more than bric-a-brac if Preminger’s actors were not up to the challenge of giving Wilde a fair shake. Ham-resistant as ever, the director permitted Madeleine Carroll none of the florid gestures and vocal overemphasis with which stage actresses are often tempted to play a woman with a past. Carroll’s subtle performance is
Maternal sacrifice in The Fan, Preminger’s overlooked adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Mrs. Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll) (right) tries to save her married daughter Lady Windermere (Jeanne Crain) from ruining her reputation.
attuned to the intimacy of film. Preminger helped Jeanne Crain, the sole American in the cast (who speaks in a mid-Atlantic diction), to eliminate any trace in her voice or body language of a casual contemporary quality. Her Lady Windermere, surely her finest performance, is graceful and touching. George Sanders as a world-weary Lord Darlington; Martita Hunt as the choruslike Duchess of Berwick, her every syllable dripping with venom; and Virginia McDowall as the Duchess’s idiotically compliant daughter (“Yes, Mamá,” are the only words she utters) are pitch perfect. More than any of his Fox films The Fan evokes a sense of the Viennese Otto, the stagestruck young man who skipped school in order to devour the world’s great plays amid the Baroque splendor of the National Library.
After completing The Fan, Otto seemed again to be at loose ends. He was incapable of not working, but he had no exciting new projects to engage him. His seven-year contract would be coming up for renewal or revision in a year, in the summer of 1950, and he began to wonder if Zanuck would ask him to sign. He also wondered whether he would want to continue working at the studio. As Preminger had to have seen, his track record was uneven.
After Laura there had been no other triumphs. Fallen Angel, his second psychological thriller, was only spottily effective. Forever Amber may have been one of the finest rescue missions in recent Hollywood history, but Preminger himself had no respect for it. His completion of the two projects begun by Lubitsch had yielded two stillborn talkfests. The well-made Daisy Kenyon was a work in a minor key, Centennial Summer a not altogether fluent musical. And then there was The Fan: supremely intelligent, “Viennese,” and, both at the time and ever since, completely dismissed. Although Preminger’s refusal to repeat Laura represented a praiseworthy effort to defy typecasting, there was still reason for the director and for Zanuck to feel dissatisfied, to regard the career as floating on a promise as yet unfulfilled. Prestige projects seemed to be handed out to other directors.
As Preminger’s fortunes at the studio in 1949 and 1950 seemed to be dipping, the top director on the lot was Joseph Mankiewicz, who won Oscars for both writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives (in 1949) and All About Eve (in 1950). It was Mankiewicz’s impression that Otto’s personality was holding him back. “I felt that Otto was angry at the position he was in,” Mankiewicz observed forty years later.
In Vienna he had been a man of power, and got all those things a man of power should get. Otto played a Nazi too well; he became too good a villain and I was sorry for him because nobody would let him off the hook. He looked like a villain: Otto was not handsome—and he became defensive very quickly. He did not want to be disliked. I think it puzzled him, and made him sad. But I don’t think he ever quite understood that the American ego is different from the Germanic ego. In Vienna Otto could say “It stinks” to a writer and the writer would say, “Yah! Herr Preminger, you are right.” The Germans are used to being more loud. I worked with Fritz Lang, another German who was hated. The grips had rigged a light and they were going to drop it on Fritz, who made many violent enemies. Oh, how that man was reviled! But Fritz was more sophisticated than Otto for some reason and he did make friends, mostly actors. I guess Otto didn’t. Fritz kept very quiet, lived a very quiet life, and Otto didn’t. Otto was in a strange country, he had a strange look, and if it had been me I’d have played it cool. But that wasn’t Otto’s way33
For what were to be the three final films under his original Fox contract, Preminger, perhaps yielding to the pull of the system, returned to the noir terrain of Laura. In quick succession he produced and directed Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and The Thirteenth Letter (1950).
As José Ferrer, Whirlpool’s costar, recalled, “Otto and Zanuck hoped that the film, which is like a
sequel to Laura— it had the same star, the same mood and atmosphere—would have the same success.”34 Like Laura, Whirlpool is a sleek thriller about the well-to-do. Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), the fashionable, neurotic wife of a prominent psychoanalyst, is a kleptomaniac. When she is arrested at an upscale department store for stealing a broach, she is saved by Korvo (José Ferrer), an astrologer and hypnotist who specializes in separating gullible rich women from their money. Korvo convinces Ann that he can cure her; his real goal, however, is to implicate her in the murder of his ex-mistress, a patient of Ann’s husband. At the end, Korvo is gunned down in front of the large portrait of the woman he has killed.
Working with experienced screenwriters like Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, Preminger could not get the convoluted plot to gel. But his shrewd casting of the two leads helped to offset the damage. As the unstable heroine Gene Tierney who had already suffered periods of mental illness and in later years was to have a harrowing history of breakdowns followed by fragile recoveries, is startlingly effective. Korvo’s comment to Ann, that she has become imprisoned in her role as a pampered, dressed-to-perfection housewife, is also a comment on Tierney’s own “perfection” as a well-behaved Hollywood mannequin. As Korvo (kuervo in Yiddish is a male prostitute, an apt description of the character’s gigolo manner), José Ferrer offers the enticing spectacle of a phony actor playing a phony actor. The hamminess that was to curdle almost all Ferrer’s work is exactly the point here: Korvo is an out-and-out charlatan. For the other major role, that of the society therapist with a trophy wife, Preminger made a rare casting flub: in a tuxedo Richard Conte looks and sounds like a thug. “Conte was a big mistake,” Ferrer said. “We all felt it while we were shooting the film. He suggested a New York street type rather than a well-educated psychiatrist.”35
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