In many ways the film condenses, distorts, and simplifies history: it offers a contrived ledger of ideological checks and balances, with one compassionate British officer, for instance, played off against a British bigot; it virtually erases any Arab perspective; it makes a naive though well-intentioned effort to invoke a spirit of brotherhood between Jews and Arabs; and, as in the novel, the teeming historical background is often, perhaps unavoidably, more compelling than the leading characters. Nevertheless Exodus does not fail its great subject. Working on a vast canvas Preminger rises to the challenge, employing a more varied stylistic range than on any other film.
Throughout, there are magisterial tracking shots that follow the principal characters. The camera moves with Kitty as she walks through the refugee camp in Cyprus and among the refugees huddling in groups on board the Exodus, and it tracks Dov Landau marching through uphill streets
Freedom fighters Ari (Paul Newman) and Reuben (Paul Stevens) in Jerusalem, in one of Preminger’s wide-angle Panavision shots for Exodus.
in Jerusalem as he tries to locate the secret headquarters of the Irgun. Without relying on a single close-up, in these sweeping wide-angle shots Preminger trusts the audience to notice details.
But in this story pitted with conflict, the filmmaker relies on other kinds of syntax besides his customarily dispassionate long shots and long takes. In the film’s single most stirring passage, as Ari’s uncle Akiva Ben Canaan (David Opatashu), an Irgun leader, conducts an interrogation of Dov Landau, Preminger abandons his usual detachment, creating through cutting and camera placement a greater identification with Dov than he allows with any other character. As Akiva, methodically preparing and then drinking tea, presses the young man to reveal the truth of how he survived in a concentration camp (by allowing himself to be used “like a woman”), Preminger and his cinematographer Sam Leavitt darken the edges of the wide screen and move the camera in for tighter shots of Dov. With lighting and editing enhancing the performances, the scene attains a shattering impact. Preminger’s uncharacteristic use of close-ups in the scene in which Barak Ben Canaan visits his brother Akiva in prison achieves equal force. The brothers, political opponents who have not spoken in years, regard each other across prison bars in a silence eloquent with choked love.
Preminger goes for broke in three action set pieces. His handling of Dov Landaus hair’s-breadth escape from British soldiers come to arrest Akiva and his posse for blowing up a wing of the King David Hotel is a masterpiece of wide-screen mise-en-scène. Photographed in wide-angle deep-focus shots, Dov scrambles down stairs, climbs over walls, creeps along side streets, and hides out in a church, the Ethiopian Cathedral in Jerusalem, as a ceremony is in progress. Preminger and his favorite editor, Louis Loeffler, choreograph the film’s major action sequence, the escape of political prisoners from Acre prison, as a vast relay race in which each participant enacts a small, perfectly timed role. Although he didn’t have the equipment to light a high-angle shot that would have included within the same frame 40,000 Israelis congregated in a square and Barak Ben Canaan on a balcony announcing partition, the sequence nonetheless has the size it needs. The milling crowd is among the most wired in film history, a result of the excitement of waiting for the lottery, the tension brought on by numerous retakes, and the announcement Preminger made to the throng that Adolf Eichmann had just been caught.
In other scenes where the audience might have expected to be overwhelmed, Preminger understates. For Akiva Ben Canaan’s death scene, for instance, the director’s every choice refutes cliché. Instead of filming Akiva’s death in shadowy close-ups overlaid with musical accompaniment, Preminger places it in the back of a car in bright sunlight as American jazz crackles on the car radio. Richly ambivalent, his direction here is shot through with visual and aural surprise. Also skirting expectation is the sequence that concludes Act I, in which the Exodus is given permission to leave Cyprus for Palestine. Choosing not to play the moment for pathos or as an ultimate victory—the release of the ship, after all, is only a prelude to the rest of the story—Preminger and Leavitt film the departure in a terse single take that intentionally does not rise to a swelling climax. Preminger concludes the film on a similarly restrained note. There’s no sweep or triumph in the final shot of many Israeli soldiers scrambling onto trucks that will carry them into battle. Honoring history, the film ends not with a period or a flourish, but in a state of suspension, as in a grim lineup the trucks rumble off to a war that over six decades later is far from terminated. Preminger’s sobering mise-en-scène underlines the fact that a nation may have been created but its struggle for survival has only just begun.
In the film, as in the novel, the two leading characters are unequal to the electrified history against which their conventional romance is played out. Leon Uris’s protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, is a swashbuckling superhero who confronts and overcomes great obstacles. He orchestrates the exodus of six hundred Jewish refugees from Cyprus to Palestine in Act I and the release of political detainees from Acre prison in Act II. The character is conceived as a Hollywood stereotype, and Paul Newman, who makes his entrance from the sea bare-chested and flashing his deep blue eyes, looks as if he stepped off the jacket of a romance novel. Even in the scenes in which Ari masquerades as a British officer and as an Arab, Newman looks, sounds, and moves like an American movie star. Nonetheless, Newman’s stern, tight-lipped performance—sentiment is a luxury a character like Ari has no time for— melds with Preminger’s tone, which emphasizes history rather than histrionics. Newman evokes the hard-driving quality of a Sabra engaged in a life-or-death struggle to secure a Jewish homeland. However, the character’s aria at the end, as he presides over the joint burials of a Jew, Karen, and an Arab, Ari’s childhood friend Taha, and anticipates the long fight ahead, demands an oratorical weight Newman was unable, or unwilling, to provide. His tone is too casual, his diction too sloppy. Trumbo’s writing for this climactic moment, both blessing and prophecy, is far from incandescent, but it rises to a lyrical pitch Newman’s inner-directed style does not begin to accommodate. Newman fails the film at this moment, but Preminger’s friezelike composition, with the principal actors lined up above the graves as a stationary camera observes them from a distance, attains a formal beauty that honors the significance of the scene.
Israel, the “star” of Exodus, a landscape of harsh, demanding beauty. Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman, backs to the camera, are at the left; Preminger, in hat, surveys the scene at right.
As in the novel, Preminger and Trumbo place Kitty Fremont’s conversion, from anti-Semitic outsider to committed Zionist, as the narrative fulcrum, a device that contains a perhaps unconscious racism (equivalent to telling a story about apartheid in Cry Freedom by focusing on the travails of a white family). But the strategy of presenting Zionist struggle primarily from the viewpoint of an outsider affords Preminger a ready-made alibi for his detachment. Kitty is a character it would be easy to resent, but Eva Marie Saint plays her subtly and with an edge that chafes against the Hollywood-style clichés of her character’s romance with Ari.
Also transcending sentimentality is the way Preminger presents Israel, the film’s true protagonist, as a country of harsh beauty, a land as fierce as the pioneers who dedicate their lives to possessing it. In Exodus, the deserts, valleys, mountains, and seas of Israel have a wild, challenging, untamed grandeur worth fighting for. “Otto was proud to be Jewish,” Hope said, “and he was proud of the country of Israel. He appreciated the pioneer spirit—with everybody so focused on making this little country work.”46 It is that rugged spirit that his levelheaded yet ultimately moving pageant pays tribute to. And despite Preminger’s attempts to be fair to all the players in 1948 Palestine, despite his and Trumbo’s efforts to transform Leon Uris’s partisan screed into a narrative with a more politically balanced perspective, Exodus, finally, is imbued with Zionist fervor. In the end, this powerful, important, and underappreciated film expresses the commitment of a Jewish dire
ctor to a Jewish homeland.
THIRTEEN
Playing Washington
On October 3, 1960, Otto was showing Exodus to United Artists executives in New York when his assistant Nat Rudich rushed into the screening room to tell him to go to Doctors’ Hospital, where Hope, who had gone into labor on October 2, had just given birth to twins, Mark, four and a half pounds, and Victoria, four pounds. “We hadn’t expected the babies quite so soon, but we have known for three months we were to have twins,” Preminger told Louella Parsons.1 Since his apartment at 40 East Sixty-eighth Street was inadequate for his enlarged family, Otto rented two suites at the Sherry Netherland Hotel. “Otto and I had our own suite, and the twins had a suite with an English nanny we had already hired,” Hope said. “The kids were born very early—Mark was in an incubator for five weeks, Vicky for six. Thank God they are healthy grown-ups. We knew we needed a house, and only a little while after the kids were born we bought one, at 129 East Sixty-fourth Street, for $128,000. Nat Rudich had lined it up for us. We gutted it and had Saul Bass design a very modern house, which is what Otto wanted. We moved in on January 1, 1961, although it wasn’t quite finished. Otto said it was like a play out of town: if you don’t bring it in, it will never open.”2
Realizing that as a new father he would have to settle down in New York for a while, Preminger decided to return to the theater. He chose a play about the theater, a breezy comedy by Ira Levin called Critic’s Choice that
Otto delighted in playing with his infant twins, Mark and Victoria.
was typical of the kind of ephemera that dotted Otto’s inglorious Broadway résumé. “Inspired” by the careers of drama critic Walter Kerr and his wife Jean, a playwright, the show is about a drama critic facing the dilemma of having to review a bad new play by his wife. Unlike Jean Kerr, who had a modest talent for concocting lightweight fare like Mary, Mary, the character in the play is ungifted. After her show opens to disastrous notices, she returns to being a wife and mother, admitting (in prefeminist 1960) that her disapproving husband had been right all along.
“It’s not much of a play” as Howard Taubman noted in his review in the New York Times on December 15, “but drama critics will always be grateful to Mr. Preminger who, as the producer, has spent money lavishly to let George Jenkins create a resplendent, many-chambered home worthy of a drama critic.” Henry Fonda, who starred as the title character, was “a huge draw,” Hope recalled. “Otto adored him: Fonda was off book at the first rehearsal, and his performance never varied.” As the persistent wife Preminger originally had cast Gena Rowlands, but fired her early on when he realized she was wrong for the part. (How could he ever have thought Rowlands, with her coarse, slurred voice, hardened face, and glum manner, would be at home in a smart Manhattan drawing room?) He replaced her with Georgeann Johnson, a charmer with a touch of class. “Otto thought the play was quite funny at the time, but it’s clear that the show was only for its time and that time has passed,” Hope said.3 This bit of retrograde trivia ran for 189 performances, with Preminger reaping additional profits when he sold the rights to Warner Bros. In 1963 the studio released a strictly dead-on-arrival film directed by Don Weis and starring a miscast Bob Hope and a clueless Lucille Ball.
Critics Choice opened on December 14, 1960, at the Barrymore Theatre. Two days later Exodus began its reserved-seat engagement around the corner at the Warner Theatre on Broadway. “I can run back and forth when I get nervous,” Preminger joked.4
While Otto had certainly earned some time off to spend with his newborn twins, taking it easy was not his style. And so in the first few months of 1961, with his play and film doing strong business and no new project at the ready, he began to oversee renovations on his new town house. He treated the project, having the four floors of his residence redesigned to his exacting specifications, as though it was his latest superproduction. “Otto fought desperately with the architect and the contractors,” Hope remembered. “If I made pictures the way these contractors work, my movies would cost $50 million apiece,” he grumbled.5
Otto wanted a residence from which any trace of his parents’ Old World Biedermeier taste was to be proscribed. “Our modern house was certainly a reaction to the Ringstrasse ornateness Otto had grown up in and felt inundated by in Vienna, which has a corner on the market for gilt, red plush walls, and ormolu,” Hope said.6 It was Otto’s intention that each room was to be decorated completely in black and white, relieved only by an occasional accent of gray. Accessories were to be limited to silver and crystal. He wanted white walls and gray rugs as a neutral background for his collection of colorful paintings by Picasso, Chagall, Dufy Modigliani, Klee, Braque, Matisse, and Degas. To hang over the sofa in the high-ceilinged living room he purchased a twelve-foot-long Miró. For the small rock garden he purchased a huge (fifty feet by twenty-two) bronze by Henry Moore called Hungry Women and commissioned the artist to construct a special base that
The screening room in Preminger’s Manhattan town house. With a flick of a remote control buzzer, a screen would descend from the ceiling and cover the window and television cabinet.
at the slightest touch of a finger would cause the statue to rotate. He hired Abe Feder, a theatrical lighting specialist, to install lights to illuminate Hungry Women at night.
Marble being Preminger’s material of choice, he ordered gray marble tables of different shapes and sizes for every room. For the staircase he had marble banisters installed. Since Preminger’s favorite piece of furniture was the basic Charles Eames swivel-based desk chair, he placed Eames chairs in every room, along with furniture by other modernist masters such as Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobsen, and Hans Wegner. When Otto found fault with the fact that the chair seats were twenty-nine inches from the floor, he called the designer to complain and requested that the chairs be one inch higher. Eames, considering this a valid suggestion, asked his manufacturer Herman Miller to include the new height among the firm’s regular offerings.7
Otto ordered remote control devices and push buttons for every room. His prize button was the wireless remote buzzer system installed in the dining room. “If you can put on a television set by remote control, I figured you could use the same type of device to summon the maid from the kitchen,” Preminger reasoned. “Turn on the twins,” he would say, and he’d push a button in any room in the house and hear them gurgling in the nursery8
Hope, who loved antiques but in time came to appreciate her husband’s taste, argued for “frolicsome” wallpaper in the nursery. “Otto wanted white walls and a couple of Picassos, and he thought that anything else might ‘warp’ the twins’ aesthetic development,” she recalled. “But I really wanted the nursery to have a dash of bright colors and fun, and we compromised on white walls and a couple of Bemelmanses.”9 Preminger’s only other concession to color was his and Hope’s bathroom, a sanctum of luxury dominated by two bathtubs in blue marble placed end to end. At opposite ends of the room stood two blue-tiled washbasins.
For each of the three upper floors, Otto had the contractors transform closets into kitchenette units. “It makes life so much easier,” Preminger claimed.10 But, as Hope pointed out, “Otto couldn’t cook at all. He couldn’t even boil water without scorching the pan. Once he made grilled cheese sandwiches by putting the cheese in the toaster without any bread and he caused a fire. He caused another fire when he tried to grill cheese directly on the stove. He hadn’t a clue.”
Like his films, Otto’s domestic mise-en-scène—cool, severe, conceived down to the last detail according to the owner’s demands—was not for everyone. “People who hate modern gasped when they saw what Otto had designed,” Hope admitted. “It looked like the house of a celebrity: that was what Otto wanted to convey”11 Preminger modern struck Helen Lawrenson, a visiting journalist, as akin to “one of those austerely elegant new banks.”12
“Cozy” and “intimate” were not the master’s intentions, and yet in the kind of paradoxical turn that was the essence of Otto, the house with
an oddly uninviting décor was always filled with guests. “I often felt I was running a hotel,” Hope said.
Otto was always interested in people, and by no means only people in show business. For dinner, in addition to movie stars, he would invite lawyers, judges, politicians, academics, and people he might have just met on the street. Despite his reputation for yelling, Otto really was the most accessible of famous persons: if you greeted him on the street with a “Hello, Mr. Preminger,” he would stop to talk and might even invite you to dinner that night. One night he had invited Sophia Loren and someone he’d met on the street, a Jesuit priest from the University of Nevada who made enormous sculptures. Often I’d find out too late that there would be extra people for dinner. We had a live-in couple and a nanny but even so it was quite a job running the house.13
Although they were not there very often, living almost around the corner at 48 East Sixty-third Street in a pink house with a white trim façade were Gypsy Rose Lee and Erik. Gypsy’s décor, Victoriana run amok, would certainly have drawn disapproval from Otto. But Otto’s commitment to black-and-white minimalism was equally overwrought. For the brief time they were neighbors there was no contact between the former lovers or between father and son. In April 1963, Gypsy sold her house for $115,000 and relocated to a hilltop in Beverly Hills.
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