Throughout the filming Otto huddled almost nightly in his suite at the Ilikai Hotel with John and Penelope Mortimer, who were writing the screenplay for his next production, Bunny Lake Is Missing, a small suspense story that had already had the longest gestation period of any Preminger project. On the recommendation of his niece Eve, who thought the novel by Merriam Modell (writing under the pen name of Evelyn Piper) had the makings of a good thriller, Otto had bought the rights in 1958 for $75,000. On November 10 of that year he had signed a contract with Walter Newman, who had written the screenplay for The Man with the Golden Arm, for $1,500 a week. Dissatisfied with Newman’s treatment, on May 11, 1959, he hired Charles Beaumont at $1,000 a week. Again Otto was displeased. In October 1959 he signed a contract with Ira Levin, “who shall proceed to London and commence, on August 30, 1960, two weeks of conferences with Otto Preminger with respect to the rewrite of the first draft.” Levin received $60,000 for his work: $15,000 on signing, $30,000 on submission of a first draft, and $15,000 on submission of a rewrite. During this period Preminger produced Levin’s mediocre play Critic’s Choice, on Broadway, but he and the writer parted company over Bunny Lake Is Missing. On January 4, 1961, Preminger signed his Exodus writer Dalton Trumbo, also for $60,000. No luck again. Not giving up, on April 13, 1964, for $5,000 he signed a newly successful playwright, Arthur Kopit, to deliver a treatment. If Otto felt the treatment warranted a first draft, Kopit would receive $7,500 in advance followed by another $7,500 for a finished first draft and $7,500 for a final draft. If he was still standing, on completion of all services Kopit would receive $2,500. Kopit survived, but his work did not. Finally, conferring with the Mortimers in Honolulu in July and August 1964, Preminger felt he was on the right track.
What was the problem? The novel has an intriguing premise: a neurotic mother, Blanche, visiting New York, where she does not know anyone, claims that her daughter has gone missing. Because Blanche appears so unstable there is doubt about whether the child exists. If Bunny does exist, as her increasingly hysterical mother insists, then where is she? If she has been kidnapped, who is responsible? Evelyn Piper fills the novel with eccentric suspects, but in working out whodunit she gets entangled with plot twists and unconvincing villains—it turns out that a spinster teacher at the school where Bunny has just been enrolled, working in cahoots with Blanche’s own mother, has kidnapped Bunny. “When I worked on the original story, I found that the villain, the old woman who stole the child, was uninteresting,” Preminger said. “It’s a completely arbitrary solution; and it doesn’t make much sense. Then we created a rich heiress who manufactured this whole thing because she had no children and wanted a child. This also turned out to be terribly phony. I finally came to the conclusion that it would have to be someone very close [to the mother] from the beginning.”13
It was Penelope Mortimer who suggested a new villain, Blanche’s mad brother Stephen (the character does not appear in the novel), determined to eliminate Bunny because he views her as a rival for his sister’s love. Otto’s initial gratitude toward Penelope darkened into crankiness. Penelope, “a strange, mixed-up lady altogether,” according to Martin Schute, “had written a good treatment, but her final draft wasn’t working. When Otto started berating her, there were a lot of sour looks. And then when Otto ordered John to substantially rewrite Penelope’s draft, she was not best pleased, to say the least,” Schute said.14
Otto chose London for the city the hapless American family visits because, as Hope maintained, he felt “very comfortable there. By that time he had edited five or six pictures at Shepperton, and he had lots of friends in London from the old days in Vienna. And both of us liked the British style.”15 As he was also preparing promotion and publicity for the American and European openings of In Harm’s Way, Preminger set up a production office for Bunny Lake in the top floor suite of the Carlton Tower Hotel in February 1965. With Hope, the twins, and a nanny, he moved into a suite at the Dorchester.
Working with Martin Schute as his associate producer and liaison, Otto hired a crew that was entirely British except for Hope and Eva Monley (“Because of me, Otto crossed wires with unions in England,” Monley said. “At the union office he said he wouldn’t leave until they issued me a union card. Well—I got my card. Otto was incredibly loyal to me, even if he never told me I was doing a good job.”) With Monley and Schute, who both knew London well, and his production designer Don Ashton, Preminger searched for eerie locations. “We found a doll hospital in Soho,” Monley recalled. “And the house where the finale takes place we found in Hampstead Heath; it belonged to the estate of Daphne Du Maurier and had just the creepiness Otto wanted. We also found a hospital in Hammersmith that was plenty weird-looking. It had lots of empty wards, which we took over for filming.”16 As Martin Schute remembered, “For one scene, set against a row of Soho strip clubs with pictures of naked women out front, I was told that we needed a copyright fee only if the camera was moved. So I had to tell Otto to be sure to keep the camera still, so the women would not appear to be bumping and grinding. He listened, as he always did to anything legal.”17
Otto’s casting was lucky. For the American visitors, he signed Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea, who looked so much alike they could actually have been brother and sister. “When we checked our genealogies Keir and I found that we are distantly related,” Carol Lynley said. “We share some relatives from Waterville, Ireland. Otto told me that Columbia had wanted him to cast Jane Fonda and Ryan O’Neal, but he said he wanted Keir and me. Then they came back and said they wanted him to use Ann-Margret. He refused again. And again he said he wanted Keir and me. This time, Columbia agreed.”18
“Otto had offered me the part that Brandon de Wilde played in In Harm’s Way, but I had turned it down,” Keir Dullea remembered. “I had just done a war film, The Thin Red Line, and, to be honest, I didn’t want to work with John Wayne. This time I accepted. I was in awe at the prospect of working with Otto Preminger, who was world-famous.”19
For the subsidiary role of a stiff-upper-lip inspector, the kind of part that a journeyman British actor like John Williams could have walked through, Preminger, on February 20, 1965, for a fee of $200,000 and a six-week shooting commitment to start on April 21, signed Laurence Olivier, the premier actor of the English-speaking world. To play delicious British eccentrics he cast Noël Coward, Martita Hunt, and Finlay Currie.
With young American actors in the leading roles surrounded by a galaxy of theater-trained British veterans, the setup recalled Saint Joan. And indeed, Keir Dullea responded to Preminger much as Jean Seberg had, with a mixture of fear and loathing.
I had heard all the rumors about Preminger, but I felt he wouldn’t do that to me. I was wrong, oh so wrong. I began to feel that the character he played in Stalag 17 was Otto on a good day. Our relationship started on a wrong note. When we were walking in London toward the Dorchester before shooting started I was ill at ease and to make conversation I told a story about the Duke of Wellington whose house is a museum that we were passing by. “That is the most fascinating story I ever heard,” he said in a sarcastic tone that told me it wasn’t. Once shooting began he just started in on me, and going to work I felt like the Al Capp character with a black cloud over his head.
I was playing a crazy character and the director was driving me crazy. Worse than the screaming, far worse, was the sarcasm. When, from sheer nerves, I would go up on lines, he would say, “Well, Mr. Dullea, you were such a promising actor; now you can’t remember lines. What’s the matter with you?” Slight at first, the sarcasm would build and build. He had a real sadistic streak that went beyond being a “technique” for working with actors. He enjoyed inflicting horrendous humiliation in front of an audience. (I couldn’t help noticing that when we did the looping at the end, he was very nice to Carol and me because he had no one to show off for then.) About halfway through the shoot, I began to wonder, Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?
Dullea remained silent for thr
ee-quarters of the shooting. “I was so cowed I felt beaten before the day would begin, praying he wouldn’t do it every day. I never cried; I swallowed it.” When Irvin Kershner, who had directed Dullea in his first film, The Hoodlum Priest, and had remained a close friend, visited the set, the actor unburdened himself. Kershner gave him advice that proved instrumental. “ ‘You will never out-Preminger Preminger,’ he told me. ‘You have to find a way that’s typically you that will take him by surprise.’ ” Soon thereafter, when Preminger began to scream at him, Dullea sat down and, in a voice so small and squashed it could hardly be heard, said he didn’t feel well. “What are you saying? I can’t hear you,” Preminger bellowed.
His attention was so much on me that he forgot his “act.” “You scare the shit out of me,” I said. “You scare the shit out of every actor.” I really went bananas. “Keir, we don’t want to scare you,” he said with great composure. “Take a half hour and we’ll begin again.” He was incapable of an apology, but he never got at me again. Not once. I shouldn’t have had to do that.
There seemed to be a pattern. Otto went after a certain kind of sensitive, good-looking young leading man: Tryon, John Saxon, me. But as always with Otto there were contradictions, because he didn’t go after Sal Mineo on Exodus.
Dullea was convinced that Preminger prevented him from being as strong as he might have been. “Nobody ever gave the performance of his career in a Preminger film,” Dullea claimed.
No actor ever peaked with him. How could you? Everybody was watching his back. If part of you is busy protecting yourself, you’re not in the role entirely: you can’t be. Because I was so tense my voice is in a higher register than it is in any other film. If I had felt secure I would have given a more dimensional performance. I would have made the character more normal-seeming at the beginning, before he turns. The subtlety that I felt I was able to give to my work in 2001, because Stanley Kubrick created a safe atmosphere where actors were not afraid to be foolish or wrong, was missing on Otto’s set. I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.20
(“Otto thought Keir was terrific in the role and that no one at the time could have been better,” Hope recalled.21 Dullea’s response: “Why didn’t he ever tell me?”22)
Unlike her costar Carol Lynley survived the filming with good memories. “Otto never got to me the way he got to Keir,” she said.
But unlike Tom Tryon, Keir was able to handle the pressure. He never fell apart. I liked the way Otto worked; he always allowed plenty of time for rehearsals, and I loved his shooting in long takes, which helps actors to get a rhythm going.
Otto did yell at me once or twice, however, and I finally got to fight with him. The worst time was during a scene in the school where I go up the stairs looking for Bunny and kids are coming down. He started in on me and in front of two hundred kids I yelled back. It was a terrific shouting match. An explosion! It was wonderful!
Patricia Bosworth, one of the many journalists Preminger had invited to the set, caught Lynley on a bad day. “Preminger begins to give Carol line readings, he tries to show her how a particular word should be stressed. Finally,
Otto coaches Laurence Olivier, the world’s leading actor at the time, on the set of Bunny Lake Is Missing.
in exasperation, he rushes over to show Carol Lynley the way he thinks the character should be played. He continues his savage criticism of Carol until she is sobbing uncontrollably. When she is completely hysterical, he shoots the close-up. ‘I don’t think Lee Strasberg would approve,’ Olivier said.”23
“I could handle Otto’s explosions, but I was petrified of working with Laurence Olivier,” Lynley recalled.
He told us to call him Larry, and he made a point of talking about his wife and kids, but still I was so intimidated that I stiffened up in all the early scenes. Otto said I was terrible and that he was going to replace me with Barbara Bouchet—with Otto you had to do it full out the first time and then he would either edit or leave you alone. When I told him the reason was that I was in awe of Olivier, he said, “We are going to break for lunch, and you have one hour to get over it.” The way I got over it was I transferred my own fear into the character’s fear about having lost her daughter.24
Keir Dullea noticed that Preminger didn’t carry on as much with him and Carol Lynley whenever they had scenes with Olivier. “Olivier did not defend Carol and me publicly,” Dullea recalled, “but I know that he went to Otto privately and asked him not to yell at the ‘children.’ ‘I’m too old to change,’ Otto responded.” To help out “the children,” or perhaps because of his own nerves (at the time Olivier was struggling with the fear that he would dry up whenever he was onstage) he ran lines frequently with the young actors behind Otto’s back. “Otto didn’t have to ‘direct’ Olivier, who had figured out his role beautifully before he had ever come onto the set,” Dullea noted. “But he wouldn’t have yelled at the big names anyway, and to that extent he was both a coward and a hypocrite. He was deferential to all the British actors except Martita Hunt, whom he treated horrendously When she complained about her wig, he screamed, ‘Don’t talk to me about your wig. You’re an ugly old hag anyway! You want to be in my film? Do it my way!’ ”25
Preminger shot Bunny Lake entirely on location in London from April 21 to June 19. Because he did not want to shoot day for night, midway through he scheduled eighteen grueling nights of filming, when he and his team worked from eleven to about four or five in the morning. Despite the added tension of the night shooting, he not only kept ahead of his schedule, he also met each day with the playwright Horton Foote, who was writing the script of Hurry Sundown, an epic set in the American South, which Otto was planning to film on location the following summer. His indispensable assistants, Martin Schute and Eva Monley helped to keep Otto on schedule. For Monley, the shoot was problem-free and she would go on to work for “Papa” on two more films. But for Schute, who liked and understood Otto and who with his wife Pat remained a good friend of the Preminger family, Bunny Lake was the end of the line professionally. “I had to quit after the film, when Otto accused me of taking money on the side,” Schute recalled. “My brother ran a car hire and Otto said I pocketed the 50 percent commission, which wasn’t the case.”26
Bunny Lake Is Missing was well received in Europe, especially in London, where critics enjoyed the film’s distillation of local atmosphere into a mise-en-scène of mounting terror. When the film opened in the United States on October 3, 1965, however, it was dismissed. “Nothing outside of a new script could save this phony film from going … straight down the drain,” Bosley Crowther grumbled. Frances Herridge in the New York Post concurred, writing that Preminger “has come up with some stunning scenes … but without a strong screenplay to go with them they seem technique for the sake of technique.”
“We all had such high hopes—I thought I might even be Oscar-nominated,” Carol Lynley said.
But the film was not a success in America. Maybe it was the subject. I was told that people with children didn’t want to see it and people who didn’t have children didn’t care. Maybe it was because it was one of the last films shot in black-and-white. I also felt the critics reviewed Otto the Terrible more than the movie. There was block voting then, and when I asked Mike Frankovich, the president of Columbia Pictures, why they weren’t pushing the film, he told me they were going with The Collector. Columbia just sat on the film. I was heartsick.27
A number of reviewers objected to the last-act revelation that it was Stephen who kidnapped Bunny. But planting clues of Stephen’s guilt from the beginning, Preminger and the Mortimers justify their denouement. In the opening tracking shot, for instance, Stephen walking across a garden stops to pick up a white teddy bear, his seemingly casual gesture drawing a link between him and Bunny. Keir Dullea, as he must, portrays the character with a tantalizing duality—on the surface Stephen seems a devoted family man, a pleasant-looking all-American. But dark undercurrents, sud
den blasts of prickliness and rage, periodically disturb his Boy Scout veneer. Also
An odd couple, a sister (Carol Lynley) and brother (Keir Dullea) who behave like husband and wife, in Bunny Lake Is Missing.
unsettling is the illicit aura of the brother-sister relationship. High-strung and often mistaken by the British characters for husband and wife, Stephen and Ann seem to be harboring a secret. In a scene simmering with incestuous overtones, Stephen, lounging in a bathtub, and Ann, seated on the rim of the tub, take turns smoking a cigarette.
Even if the viewer can’t buy the way the story ends, Bunny Lake Is Missing can and indeed demands to be savored as a collection of scintillating set pieces. In Preminger’s calibrated mise-en-scène, seemingly neutral locations—the Little People’s School, where Ann enrolls her daughter; a pub; the bare apartment Ann moves into—acquire threatening undertones. And as the increasingly distraught mother searches for her daughter, every setting begins to rumble with menace. Decorated with African masks, whips, skulls, and chains, the dwelling of her lubricious landlord (Noël Coward, whooping it up) becomes a Sadean den. Stephen attacks Ann and thereby reveals his villainy in a doll hospital, lit only with candles that turn the characters’ faces into minatory masks. Its only apparent resident a nurse glimpsed in deep focus through an inside window, the hospital where Stephen takes Ann after he knocks her out has high-ceilinged corridors crawling with ill will and only an off-screen cough breaks the creepy silence. Escaping through the hospital’s basement, Ann runs past engines and pistons whirring, chugging, and pumping, and a lab with caged rats overseen by a robotic janitor.
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