When he returned from Las Vegas, Otto began working with Saul Bass on the ad campaign. “Making a commitment to one central idea that would
tell audiences what the film is about, we wanted to develop a seductive, provocative image that would cause a large number of people to say, ‘Hey, I’m interested in seeing that film,’ ” Bass recalled. “Our idea for the film was a crooked arm [that signals this is] the story of a dope addict; we thought of that arm as a metaphor for the distorted life of the addict.” Bass recalled that a number of film executives assured them their campaign was “absolutely, outrageously incorrect. They told us we would be committing suicide if we opened with that image of a crooked arm.” Once the ad was sent out, Preminger began to receive complaints from exhibitors, some of whom threatened to replace the ad with photos of Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. Bass overheard Otto’s response to one disgruntled caller:
“We have thought about all these matters, we have considered your point of view, and we have rejected it. These are the ads, and if you change anything I will pull the picture.” There was a long silence at the other end of the line, then, “O.K., Mr. Preminger.” That conversation revealed Otto’s strength, his belief, and his commitment: I would have jumped off the roof for Otto. The truth of the matter is that those qualities that made him difficult also made him a man that you could count on: I would have trusted my life with him, and I know he would always have saved me, no matter what.21
Once they had their logo, Preminger and Bass decided to use it for the film’s title sequence. “As we began to think about it, it made a lot of sense because the very qualities that made it work as a metaphor for a film in an ad campaign certainly made it work as a mood setter, a metaphor for what was to come in the film. In a sense, we also wound up reinventing the title sequence.” Bass’s idea, a series of lines cutting across the screen in a staccato rhythm which ultimately coalesce into the image of the distorted arm, caused furious rows with his boss. “ ‘The lines must move,’ I told Otto. ‘Wrong, they must be static,’ he said. ‘Must move,’ I insisted. ‘Must be static,’ he repeated. This escalated. We started to scream. He began to pound the desk and his head turned purple. Then he started pounding the wall behind his desk. I walked out. ‘No way I am gonna do it that way’ I yelled before slamming the door.”22 On the way back to his office, Bass, cooling down, began to consider the merits of Otto’s thinking. As soon as he entered his office, Otto was on the line saying that perhaps Bass had been right all along: yes, the lines should move. With equal fervor, the two warriors now reversed their former convictions. In the title sequence, as if they are responding to Elmer Bernstein’s pulsating jazz score, the lines move.
Weeks before the film’s scheduled premiere on December 14, 1955, Preminger launched the ad campaign, personally selected the first-run theaters where the film would open in New York and Los Angeles, and geared up for the censorship battle he fully expected to confront. As he hoped it would, the Production Code Administration office objected to the film’s basic subject matter and refused its Seal of Approval. For Preminger, there was no possibility of compromise or negotiation—and there was also little to fear. His earlier battles had seriously punctured the Code’s authority, and because of the consent decree Otto had no trouble getting playdates. The staid Loew’s chain, by now officially divorced from MGM, booked the film without the Seal. “And this time,” as Preminger boasted, “United Artists stood behind me. They went so far as to resign from the Association of Motion Picture Producers and [then] distributed the picture.”23
Still, in his many public appearances to promote the film, Preminger remained in battle mode, presenting himself and his film as under attack. Once again, as with the fracas over The Moon Is Blue, Preminger enlarged the playing field, transforming Joe Breen’s attempts at censoring a single film into a discussion that touched on freedom of speech, the responsibilities and privileges of the artist, and the state of the nation. As Mike Beck, the United Artists East Coast press agent, noted, “Otto is most bold when attacked. He called the Code people dolts, idiots, imposers on freedom.”24 “I am not a rebel,” Preminger said, defending himself against Breen’s charges. “My only instrument of censorship is my own taste—which I think is good. To be successful a film must have a moral, as mine most certainly does. Only a small section of the public will buy sensation for sensations sake. I don’t feel that I made a picture that in any way could induce people to take narcotics. On the contrary, I feel that if anything this picture is a warning against the consequences of taking narcotics.”25
When censor boards in Baltimore, Atlanta, and Milwaukee refused to show the film in an uncut version, Preminger promised that “there will be no compromise with the forces of censorship. I will bring every legal force to bear, going to the United States Supreme Court if necessary to permit my film to be shown in its complete form.”26 When the Maryland Board of Censors demanded a two-minute cut in the scene in which Frankie Machine gets ready to inject heroin, Preminger and United Artists took their case to the state court of appeals. In March 1956 the appellate court reversed the decision of the censorship board, claiming that the film did not advocate the use of heroin. “[My successful case] established freedom of expression for motion pictures,” Otto contended.27
Preminger was to savor three other legal triumphs in his battles over The Man with the Golden Arm. Before the film opened, the screenwriters’ union protested Otto’s billing, “a film by Otto Preminger,” and lost its case. (Otto was establishing his bid for admission to the pantheon of auteur directors several years before the French auteur theory had gained a secure foothold in America.) On June 14, 1961, six years after the film had opened, Geoffrey M. Shurlock issued the film a Production Code Seal of Approval. And on December 28, 1966, when Otto sold The Man with the Golden Arm to ABC, he exacted two landmark concessions: the film would be shown without deletions and Preminger himself would select places for commercial breaks.
Preminger’s skillful pre-opening campaign ensured notoriety for his film before a single ticket had been sold. As Bass recalled, “By the time the film had its world premiere in New York the basic symbol had been so widely disseminated that the marquee of the Victoria Theatre on Broadway carried only the arm: there was no need for any writing whatever.”28 The buzz was so mighty that not even a negative notice from Bosley Crowther in the New York Times on December 15—“There is nothing very surprising or exciting here,” he declared—could hurt business. The film earned a very healthy $4,350,000 in rentals.
Nonetheless, there is no mistaking that as the impresario of Nelson Algren’s lower-depths Chicago, Otto Preminger was miscast. The novel is an insider’s account, written in a feverish hipster’s prose that approximates the inner monologues of characters steeped in chaos and despair. The film is distinctly an outsider’s view, a tourist’s glance at the urban dispossessed. Where Algren is loose, anarchic, overheated, Preminger for the most part remains within his characteristic zone of aloofness. Where Algren is fearless and unruly, Preminger is measured, cautious, tame. As Preminger in one of their misbegotten meetings told Algren, “Write a screen treatment for me about the suffering of drug addicts, but not too much suffering; what we want is something creative that everybody wants to see.”29
Preminger’s detachment is apparent in the opening tracking shot, which follows Frankie Machine as he gets off a bus and walks down the street toward his neighborhood bar. In a series of smooth movements that Preminger worked out (too) carefully with his cinematographer, Sam Leavitt, the camera presents an urban streetscape groomed to represent a “sordid” environment—“Chicago” rather than Chicago.
In his December 20 review in the Nation, Robert Hatch accused Preminger of replacing Algren’s “respect” for his characters with “contempt.” The charge is too severe. But Preminger’s distance, from which he displays for mainstream audiences a simulacrum of a strange new world, a museum of the life of slum dwellers, works against the temper of the material
. There is no pulse in the film’s eerily underpopulated, too clean street scenes. Pedestrians glimpsed through windows and doors look like extras. And the stiff-jointed scenes set in the bar, a home away from home for Algren’s down-and-outs, contain no trace of the carnivalesque energy, the roiling give-and-take of the urban inferno Algren creates in his novel.
But even disregarding Algren’s searing novel altogether and judging the film on its own terms, as mainstream, middlebrow entertainment, The Man with the Golden Arm, “a film by Otto Preminger,” lacks the fluency of the director’s most assured work. To Nelson Algren, the film’s sternest critic, “the scenes, like those picture postcards we once viewed in the corner drug store, at 10-for-a-penny by turning the crank of a kinescope machine, drop one by one before your eyes with mechanical precision.”30
Nonetheless, the film has its moments. The famous title sequence, with Saul Bass’s moving lines playing against the rhythms of Elmer Bernstein’s percussive main theme, achieves a dynamic force that nothing in the film quite matches. Although Preminger overuses it, Elmer Bernstein’s landmark score (deservedly Oscar-nominated), at the time as original and daring as Saul Bass’s title sequence, approximates the meter of Nelson Algren’s jazzlike prose. In the rhythms of Bernstein’s music are echoes of the novel’s delirium.
(For romantic scenes and for scenes of Frankie’s redemption, Bernstein also writes effective “straight” music.) Working with and often screaming at Sam Leavitt, Preminger creates some stark black-and-white images. During the card games that Frankie deals, an overhanging light casts minatory shadows onto the intent players. In a few scenes set at the smoke-laden Safari Club, a strip joint, dancers in deep focus perform joyless gyrations. The staircase and hallways in Frankie’s tenement, and the drab apartment that he and his wife cohabit, seem engrained with sorrow.
Preminger doles out the few scenes of drug-taking and withdrawal like the X-rated set pieces the audience has been primed to expect and gives them an illicit frisson. It’s as if Preminger is saying to his 1955 viewers, “You’re really not supposed to be seeing this.” Whereas almost any contemporary director would shoot the big scenes with visual overkill—rapid cutting, subjective renderings of the character’s frenzy—Preminger retains his composure, departing only slightly from his usual objectivity. He shoots all the drug scenes in a single, uncompromising take and with minimal visual punctuation, relying mostly on Sinatra and on Bernstein’s jazz scoring to crank up the volume. The first time Frankie injects heroin, Preminger moves the camera in for an extreme close-up on the actor’s face, reverting to a rare use of visual italics as compensation for not showing the needle entering the character’s arm (an impermissible image in the mid-1950s). In the first and still powerful withdrawal scene, Preminger starts with a discomfiting high-angle shot before moving the camera in closer to watch Frankie’s twitches and spasms.
Unlike the film’s airless, studio-built “Chicago,” Frank Sinatra, with his coarse-grained speech, his hard eyes, and his slumped posture, comes across as the real thing. He never pushes for an effect. Simply, without any actorly fuss, he conveys his character’s differing attitudes to the two women in his life, his pity for the wife he no longer loves, his conflicted attraction to Molly. With a wounded look in his eyes and body language that signals his character’s agony, he rises fully to the long-take demands of the drug-taking and withdrawal set pieces that Preminger has given him. Sinatra is equally persuasive when Frankie, wearing a crooked bow tie, his hands shaking and his face covered in sweat, bombs in an audition as a drummer for a jazz band. Finally, though, Sinatra, who indeed earned his Academy Award nomination for best actor, does not have the technique or the depth to offer what Marlon Brando would have, a sense of the inner life of the character and of the tormented past that drove him to his addiction. But that kind of revelation is not what Preminger had in mind.
In contrast to their bedraggled-looking costar, Eleanor Parker and Kim Novak seem like visiting celebrities with hair and makeup just so. Some of the acting in Parker’s voice can perhaps be defended on the grounds that she is playing a character who is faking her life, pretending to be a cripple when she is not and “performing” misery in order to hold on to her distracted husband. Even if she is often strained, a result of her simply being and sounding too cultivated for the character, her performance is courageous nonetheless.
Kim Novak, too, never quite looks and moves as if she lives in the world of the film. She doesn’t fully inhabit her character’s apartment or the burlesque house where she is a “hostess.” And when Preminger pauses at one point to watch the character walk home from work in a spangled, tight-fitting dress, Kim Novak looks unmistakably like a movie star. She doesn’t have the fire for her two big scenes, convincing Frankie to quit drugs, and then, after locking him in her closet, frantically pacing back and forth; and Preminger, typically, does not try to cover for her with cinematic embellishments. He shoots both scenes without a single cut. But in many of her moments with Frankie, Novak is touching, and rather than seeming like a nervous Hollywood beauty trying her best, she evokes Algren’s sad-eyed young woman facing a dead-end life. Preminger has helped the actress to endow these scenes with her own warmth and insecurity—the qualities that caused two notoriously impatient men, her director and costar, to subdue their tempers and go to bat for her. Throughout, Novak focuses on Frankie Machine a gaze filled with solicitude, hurt, and love. And in the last shot, her eyes glued to her man as she walks a step behind him, she gives Frankie a worried look which, just before the camera moves in for a sly medium shot on a sign that says “No Right Turn,” helps to qualify the “happy” ending that Preminger and his scriptwriters whipped up. Novak’s stare of intense concern signals the possibility that Frankie’s cure may not be for good after all.
Like The Moon Is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm is historically if not artistically a film to remember. As Nelson Algren conceded, “Inasmuch as the film Preminger made from my book broke the censorship on the drug traffic, it was worth making.”31 Although the controversy that both films created in the 1950s is understandable now only by placing them within a historical context in which taboo words and subjects had an aura of black magic, the films have had different legacies. The Moon Is Blue is regarded as a historical footnote, while The Man with the Golden Arm has enjoyed a lingering reputation as a major artistic achievement. Accurately enough described in 1955 as “daring” and “hard-hitting,” a half century on it seems hollow at the core, a stodgy, at times crudely drawn period piece that nonetheless manages to attain a creepy power. As Otto Preminger’s only overrated film, however, it holds a unique place in the canon.
NINE
Miss Iowa
For his first three independent projects, Preminger tackled controversial material. For his fourth, he went out on a different kind of limb.
At the top of an application form distributed to theaters, drama schools, high schools, and colleges in the spring of 1956 appeared the following statement:
Otto Preminger (producer-director of Laura, The Moon Is Blue, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm) is convinced that there is somewhere in the world an unknown young actress who can be an exciting Joan of Arc. By means of a competition conducted with the cooperation of motion picture theatres throughout the world, he intends to find a young actress who will play this role. Mr. Preminger will visit 15 cities, starting in September [1956], to audition selected candidates who have fulfilled the requirements listed below. For these auditions, contestants must be prepared to play Scene I of [George Bernard] Shaw’s Saint Joan and Scene VI, the latter starting with Joan’s speech, “Perpetual imprisonment! Am I not then to be set free?” The most promising candidates will be selected for screen tests, and the 5 best tests will be shown on a national television show. Mr. Preminger will select the winner and cast her in Saint Joan.
The statement concluded with a warning: “Mr. Preminger’s decisions shall be final.”
Four requirements
were listed. The candidates had to be between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two; had to have a complete command of the English language; had to submit a photo; and had to complete the entry blank “shown below” and mail it before midnight August 23, 1956, to Otto Preminger, Hollywood 51, California. At the bottom of the entry blank the contestant was asked to check which city “[she] can most conveniently reach for an audition if selected: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington.” Preminger, appearing in a trailer shown in theaters throughout the United States and Canada, explained the terms of the search. “I have no specific image or character in mind,” he stated. “I only know there are certain qualities necessary to portray this part: a great deal of sincerity, honesty, an almost fanatic devotion, and naturally, also talent.”1
It may have had the trappings of a show business hustle (“My worldwide search met with equally worldwide skepticism,” Otto noted wryly),2 but his quest was genuine. He had not already cast the role, and no secret favorites were waiting in the wings. Preminger’s search—the filmmaker was hoping it would become as celebrated as David O. Selznick’s for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind— also expressed his belief that Joan, only seventeen when she was burned at the stake, should be enacted by a fresh unknown of approximately the same age. “In the theater the audience accepts an older actress in the role,” he said, noting that the part was “originally played by Sybil Thorndike when she was forty-one.” “The greatest stage actresses, however, developed a certain style and nothing that is very stylized has ever succeeded in movies. The movies are looking for a ‘being.’ The camera is more discerning, it comes closer and so we have to be more authentic. Also the film going public is less sophisticated. They don’t forgive.”3
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