(Although in 1942 Josefa had suffered a severe stroke that left her almost completely paralyzed, she survived her husband. “She was bedridden when I knew her, and needed round-the-clock care, and in those days she was not encouraged to seek rehabilitation,” Kathy Preminger remembered.10 Even as his own health declined rapidly in the six months before his death, Markus had maintained a vigilant watch over his wife. At the time, Ingo and Kate and their three children lived across the street from the elder Premingers, and ironically Kate, the young woman the snobbish Josefa had disdained in Vienna, became her greatest friend. “Kate behaved beautifully,” Otto testified.11 “My mother was so reliable and attentive that both my grandparents grew to love her,” Kathy said. “My mother told me that in her illness Josefa became sweeter.”12 When Ingo and his family moved into a larger house a year after Markus’s death, Josefa moved in with them. “She lived for several years in a room that later became our den,” Jim Preminger said. “I was very young, and she seemed very elderly to me, but she was still
Markus’s concern for his paralyzed wife Josefa, who suffered a stroke in 1942, is evident in this 1950 family photo.
a more formidable presence than my grandfather had been.”13 After Josefa began to require more attention than Ingo and Kate and their three children could provide, she was moved to a nursing home. Kate went to see her on a daily basis, bringing food and flowers. Josefa outlived her husband by five years.)
When Otto returned to filming after overseeing funeral arrangements for Markus, he was subdued but never for a moment other than completely professional. He admired Wilder’s methods. “Even though he came from Vienna, [Wilder] directed like a Prussian officer,” Preminger commented, as if talking about himself. “What he wanted with his words was rigid, absolutely rigid. Billy was a stickler for every word, because they were his words.”14 Surprisingly, however, Otto regularly messed up his lines. “When I hired him I told him every time he got his lines wrong, he owed me a jar of caviar,” Wilder recalled. “He may not have been the greatest actor, especially when it came to getting his lines right, but he was the world champion payer of debts. He missed a lot of lines, but he never missed sending a jar of caviar. He sent only the very best caviar. Now, that he did not have to do.”15 “I was happy to send [Billy] the caviar and the expense I didn’t mind, but the real price I paid was Billy directed me too well, and many people thought I was the part I played.”16
Preminger appears in three scenes. In the first, as underlings put down boards to protect his boots from contact with the muddy ground, the commandant makes a grand entrance as the American prisoners stand at attention. When the commandant speaks, his inflections laced with sarcasm and threat, he addresses the prisoners as if they were guests at a party of swells: “Guten Morgen, sergeants. Nasty weather we are having, eh? And I so much hoped we could give you a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to know. With Christmas coming on I have a special treat for you. I’ll have you all deloused for the holidays.”
In his second scene, entering the barracks to conduct a search, Preminger speaks again in a mock-gracious tone, as if holding court in a Noël Coward drawing room. “Curtains would do wonders for this barracks. You won’t get them.” His final scene has a visual gag Preminger appreciated. “The colonel wants to report to Berlin that an American officer suspected of espionage has been captured,” Otto recalled. “He has his orderly put on his boots for the phone call. During the call, he clicks his heels for his superiors. After the call, he has the orderly take off the boots. That’s a good joke, but I don’t know how many people got it.”17
Otto’s pungent performance in a hit film gave him the kind of fame few directors ever attain. But as he recognized and at least pretended to regret, it also provided ammunition to his growing list of enemies, who over the years would describe his acting in Stalag 17 as lifelike, or as an example of Otto on a good day. His work is certainly vivid, but it also reveals Preminger’s limitations. His eyes lack the liveliness of the natural screen performer, and, missing variety and shading, his vocal delivery slides toward monotony. Popping the character into the film for what are, in effect, three cameo appearances, Wilder himself seemed to be aware that a little of Otto’s Nazi goes a long way.
After completing his scenes in Stalag 17, Preminger had to report to Fox, where he was still contractually obligated to deliver a film a year. Dutifully he read scripts and stories, hoping to find a property he could take an interest in, but a few months passed without his finding a suitable vehicle. One afternoon, as he was reading a story synopsis, Zanuck called him to his office to inform him that Howard Hughes, the more-than-eccentric airplane billionaire who owned RKO, had requested Otto’s services. Zanuck told his startled employee that he had already accepted the assignment on Otto’s behalf: because Hughes needed a director who could work fast, Zanuck had recommended Otto. “[Zanuck] was indebted to Hughes for
Serving the master: Preminger as the commandant of a German camp for Allied prisoners of war in Billy Welder’s Stalag 17.
many favors financially and otherwise and wanted to show his gratitude by making him a friendly gift of me,” as Otto recalled.18
The assignment was a psychological thriller called Murder Story, starring Jean Simmons, under personal contract to Hughes. Since the British-born actress had arrived in America in 1949 to promote a film called The Blue Lagoon, Hughes had become a silent admirer. According to Hughes’s biographer Robert Brown, Simmons “awakened one morning in early 1951 to learn her contract with the British-based J. Arthur Rank Organization had been purchased by Hughes.”19 “Hughes bought me,” as Simmons herself recalled. “You can’t do that anymore, or you’d hear about it in the papers. He owned me, and I had to make four pictures for him.”20 The actress went to court to free herself from what she had come to regard as her indentured servitude to Hughes, and the upcoming film, for which she was contractually committed for no more than eighteen days of shooting, was to end her association with the billionaire. For the new film, because Hughes had already decreed that her hair was to be long, the enraged actress “whacked off the front of [her] hair with scissors. It had to be cut very, very short, which is absolutely what Hughes didn’t want.”21 In order to satisfy Hughes’s infatuation with long hair, Simmons throughout the filming would have to wear wigs.
Aware that he would be dealing with a disgruntled actress and leery of having to take orders from Hughes, Preminger was reluctant to proceed. After he read the script, he informed Zanuck that he refused to accept the assignment. That night in the witching hours Otto received a call from Hughes demanding a conference that, he was told, was to be held in a half-hour in Hughes’s battered Chevrolet. Promising Otto complete control of the project and assuring him that if he didn’t like the script he could have it rewritten by writers of his own choosing, Hughes pleaded with the director to take the job. “I’m going to get even with that little bitch, and you must help me,” he cajoled Preminger, who by the end of the postmidnight ride agreed—or was forced into agreeing—to direct.22
Preminger hired Oscar Millard, one of Ingo’s clients, to help him rewrite Murder Story. “My brother tells me you are a genius: let me see proof!” Otto exclaimed to his new writer. “Relations with Otto steadily deteriorated,” Millard recalled.23 To assist Millard, Otto hired Frank Nugent, an experienced screenwriter with a number of John Ford films on his résumé. Working quickly, with Otto providing daily supervision, they prepared a heavily revised version of Murder Story now entitled Angel Face. The original script may well have been a collection of genre clichés—the familiar story is about a femme fatale who ensnares a vulnerable man into a
Circe nailing her prey: Diane (Jean Simmons) gives Frank (Robert Mitchum) a look that promises trouble ahead in Angel Face.
web of passion and murder—but, reworked as Angel Face, it is Preminger’s most deliriously perverse excursion into noir.
The Tremayne family, enclosed in a hilltop mansion in Beverly Hill
s, is pure Hollywood Gothic. Charles, the paterfamilias, is a writer who has been unable to write since his late-in-life marriage to Catherine, wealthy, quivering with resentment and repression, and emasculating. The two characters are so wedded to their neuroses that they fail to register the lethal intentions of Tremayne’s daughter Diane, incestuously attached to her father and itching to get her hands on her stepmother’s fortune. To secure both the money and her father she is prepared to murder her stepmother. When Frank Jessup, an ambulance driver responding to an emergency call, enters the house radiating sex and indolence, Diane enlists him as a conspirator. With Franks help Diane rigs the family car so that it shifts into reverse when the driver intends to go forward. The plan misfires when Diane’s father by chance enters the car with her stepmother and both are killed. (It was Preminger, a very bad driver, who suggested the death-car motif.) Charged with murder, Diane hires a lawyer who concocts a scheme to exonerate her: if she marries Frank, they cannot testify against each other in court. After she’s released from jail Diane tries to confess to the lawyer but he silences her, assuring her that she can shout her guilt from the rooftops but she is protected by the law and cannot be tried again for a crime of which she has been acquitted. At the end, with Frank beside her, Diane plunges the car off the steep cliff next to the Tremayne house.
In this glacial salon noir, none of the principal characters survives, and family love, romantic love, justice, and the law are poisoned beyond redemption. Otto and his writers conjured a fallen world in which even the Tremayne servants, who snap at each other in Japanese (the wife is aggressively ungeishalike), and Franks normal-seeming fiancée, who turns out to be a tough cookie, provide no comfort.
Otto, for good reason pleased with the script, began filming at record speed on June 16, driving to work down Sunset Boulevard from his house in Malibu to the Lewis estate in Beverly Hills, which RKO rented to serve as the Tremayne mansion. In his autobiography Preminger, without once
The conspirators on trial for murder in Angel Face. In the foreground, the defective car engine that caused the deaths of Diane’s father and stepmother.
referring to her by name, recollected that the lead actress “was most cooperative. I enjoyed working with her.”24 That is decidedly not how Jean Simmons remembered the shooting. “Ah, Mr. Preminger … I’m sorry you mentioned his name,” Simmons said. “He was … very unpleasant. Talented, yes, and socially charming; but I was told he always picked a patsy, and on this film I was the one. I only got through it because of my costar, Robert Mitchum.”25 In a scene in which Mitchum was to strike Simmons, Preminger made the actor “slap her for real” and insisted on a number of retakes before an enraged Mitchum turned to the director and smacked him. Preminger left the set screaming for Mitchum to be replaced. But as a hired hand he was not able to get his way and he had no choice but to return to work. “Well, do you think we can be friends?” he asked his mutinous actor. “Otto, we’re all here for you,” Mitchum responded.26 There were no other incidents, but Simmons remained wary. She felt that following the orders of Howard Hughes, Preminger was treating her in a needling, disrespectful way. (On her next film, The Actress, she was directed by George Cukor. “He was everything Preminger was not. He was so kind and helpful. We rehearsed for two weeks, then shot for three. When we started to shoot, we were prepared.”)27
Mona Freeman played Robert Mitchum’s strong-willed fiancée. She recalled:
I had only one scene with Jean, who was such a nice, cute gal, and there weren’t any problems that I could see. I wasn’t aware that Jean was unhappy or that she didn’t want to do the film. Otto was certainly nice to me. He was very open to discussion. If I had any concerns I went to him; I felt I could go to him. It was Otto’s set—Hughes was never there—but there was no discord at all whenever I was there. We shot the whole thing in about twenty minutes, and frankly, it didn’t seem important. I’ve heard that it now has a huge reputation, especially in France, but I can tell you that at the time we didn’t think what we were doing was masterful: just the opposite. Mitchum, who was very easygoing, certainly didn’t take it too seriously. And neither did I. I’ve never seen the film. I’m glad to hear I was unlikable, though; I always played such likable characters.28
Working with Harry Stradling, known as the fastest cinematographer in town, Otto shot the entire film in twenty-one working days. He finished editing and postproduction by the end of September, and on December 11, 1952, RKO released the film. For a story about psychopathic behavior in a wealthy family, Preminger was exactly the right director. By this point in his career he was a master delineator of sexual derangement and of the noir set piece—and Angel Face has a number of the most memorable in the canon.
Early on, in his first visit to the mansion on the hill, Frank is bewitched when he hears a piano being played. Drawn by the music, he walks into the living room where Diane, a Circe nabbing her prey is seated at the piano, her dark eyes emitting fire and ice. The film has a memorably bizarre marriage scene. With shadows forming crisscross patterns on the wall behind her, Diane, a bedridden inmate in a prison hospital, marries Frank as prisoners who look like they have dropped in from The Snake Pit joylessly serenade the newlyweds.
Near the end, her parents dead and her husband about to forsake her, Diane takes one last walk through the deserted mansion, its shadowed rooms and corridors moaning with absence as Dimitri Tiomkin’s score—all wailing strings—mirrors the character’s unfulfillable desire. Here, in this climactic passage of operatic noir, and in contrast to his usual restraint, Preminger brings the film’s festering atmosphere to full boil. At the end of her walk Diane enters Frank’s room, sits in his oversized chair, and wraps herself in his big hound’s-tooth jacket, a moment that comes as close to a love scene as the film offers. After Frank in the finale tells Diane that he’s leaving for good, she asks to drive him to the train station. Frank, careless as ever, once again submits to her. In a moment that epitomizes the film’s fleeting gallows humor, Diane produces a bottle of champagne; seated in the car that is about to become an engine of death, the two former lovers toast each other. Then, shooting one last dark glance at Frank, Diane steps on the gas. Preminger and his scenarists offer a final turn of the screw. Before he had accepted Diane’s invitation, Frank had called a taxi, which arrives a few moments after Diane has driven the car off the cliff. His engine idling in front of the now vacant mansion, the taxi driver waits, as the film ends on “a moment of haunting emptiness like nothing else in the American cinema,” as Robert Mitchum’s biographer, Lee Server, commented.29
Jean Simmons may have thought he was brutal and Mitchum went after him, but under Preminger’s guidance the two performers were never better. Fueled by anger toward her “owner” and her “unpleasant” director, Simmons takes the bait. Her femme fatale, loaded with venom beneath a lacquered surface, is one of the most poisonous in noir, half-cocked and ready to shoot from her first scene at the piano. As the luckless antihero, the prey ensnared in the spider lady’s web, Mitchum oozes ambivalence. Neither Diane (nor the viewer) is ever quite certain about Frank’s motives. Is he attracted to, repelled by, or merely indifferent to Diane? Is he using her or allowing himself to be used by her? Is he on to her from the start, or is he so self-involved that he doesn’t really see what she is up to?
Unusual in withholding sympathy for any of its characters and marbled with astringent ironies, Preminger’s compact, fierce film is one of the masterpieces of the American cinéma maudit. American critics, by and large, were uncomfortable with the film’s seemingly un-American amorality its refusal to conform to sentimental notions about family or justice. In the New York Times on December 11, Bosley Crowther derided “the absurdly dismal finale” and warned “paying customers out for sense and sensibility to hang onto the brief appearances of Mona Freeman as the spunky realistic little nurse.” Otis Guernsey in the New York Herald Tribune bemoaned the film’s apparent detachment “from any real association with crime and punis
hment.” Parisian cinephiles, however, were quick to recognize Preminger’s achievement. Jean-Luc Godard placed Angel Face high on the list of his ten all-time favorite American films.
Racing through postproduction on Angel Face in the fall of 1952, Preminger began to prepare for the screen adaptation of The Moon Is Blue, his debut as an independent producer-director. While Hugh Herbert worked on the script, Otto began casting. On Broadway he had been delighted with Barbara Bel Geddes, the original Patty O’Neill, but he was concerned that on film she would not look young enough. Instead he chose Maggie McNamara, wonderfully fresh-looking at twenty-four, a former teenage model who had played the role in the Chicago company. To reassure his investors, Preminger needed to cast an A-list star to play the bachelor, Don Gresham. His first choice was William Holden, whom he had met while filming Stalag 17.
Offstage, Holden seemed like the man in the gray flannel suit, but as Otto sensed, the actor had a defiant streak. Holden, who accepted right away, relished the possibility of the censorship dustup he thought the film might provoke, and he also saw that starring in an independent film could be a possible financial bonanza. The contract that Carlyle Productions worked out with him—Holden would receive no salary up front but would take a percentage of the profits—established a financial model that was to become standard in the poststudio era.
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