Relying uncharacteristically on canted angles, fractured editing, disfiguring close-ups, and shock cuts from silence to sound and from light to shadow, Preminger and his cinematographer Denys Coop transform the house in which Ann at the end plays a potentially deadly game of cat-and-mouse with her now unhinged brother into a trap-laden lair. The giddy, whipped-up style—a rare display of the director indulging himself in rococo virtuosity—is an artful subterfuge, a means of attempting to paper over some gaps in narrative logic. Preminger may resort to montage editing for the finale, but in the body of the film he does not abandon his usual repertoire of long takes and camera movement. As both Dullea and Lynley recalled, Preminger “spent hours and hours” conferring with Denys Coop and camera operator Gerry Fisher, lining up shots. And throughout, the tracking, swiveling, pivoting, craning, pirouetting camera enhances the atmosphere of intimidation that engulfs the worried mother, a stranger in a strange land.
In the unlikely event that neither the story nor Preminger’s direction— the flashiest in his career—persuades the viewer, resistance is guaranteed to crumble at each appearance of Laurence Olivier, who plays with incomparable deftness the methodical, urbane Inspector Newhouse, an amateur philosopher and a skillful phrasemaker who presides over the mystery of whether Bunny Lake is missing. For the eighteen days of night shooting that Otto scheduled, Olivier would arrive after having performed Othello onstage at the National Theatre, where, altering his gait, voice, demeanor, and skin color, the actor did a great deal of great acting. Working into the wee hours with Preminger on Bunny Lake, however, he hardly seems to be acting at all. His lean performance is arguably his finest on film, the work of a master craftsman who has refined the elements of his trade to an irreducible minimum.
Preminger managed to define “a certain social theme here: if [like Ann, who has had a child out of wedlock] you do not conform to the rules of society, the law does not protect you. That is an important part of the film.”28 But he conceded, after all, that Bunny Lake Is Missing is “a small story.” Indeed, with none of the narrative scope or middlebrow seriousness that marked his recent epic cycle, the film is no more, and no less, than a well-crafted entertainment, a shimmering postnoir film noir and the last fully assured work of Otto Preminger’s career.
SIXTEEN
In Klan Country
If Bunny Lake Is Missing is “a small story,” Hurry Sundown, which Preminger worked on with Horton Foote as he was shooting in London, is just the opposite, an adaptation of a monumentally lengthy novel (1,064 pages) by Katya and Bert Gilden set in Georgia in 1946. Preminger had high hopes for the project. He had acquired the novel about eight months before its January 1965 publication. “I read it in a manuscript that Ingo showed to me,” Otto recalled. “It was very long, longer even than the published version, which is also very long, and I was fascinated by the people, and by the whole implication of the South in 1946 after World War II which, in my opinion, was the starting point of the civil rights movement.”1 Fully expecting the novel to become a best seller, Preminger had paid $100,000 for the rights and participated eagerly in all the prepublication fanfare organized by Doubleday the book’s publisher. On November 17, 1964, he had called a press conference where, with much ado, he revealed his plans to film the Gildens’ “great” novel. He also announced that his film would be a four-and-a-half-hour hard-ticket attraction that he would open in December 1966 in a handful of movie palaces at what was then the highest price scale in the history of American film exhibition. Otto promised he would charge twenty-five dollars for the best orchestra seats for the Friday and Saturday night performances, at which he was requesting that gentlemen wear black tie. (None of Preminger’s grandiose plans materialized.) “The novel has already been #2 on the best-seller lists for about 8 weeks,” he said in the Los Angeles Times on March 30, 1965, continuing to beat the drums. “Some critics say it is another Gone with the Wind. I certainly hope the picture is!” Despite Preminger’s and Doubleday’s persistent promotion, Hurry Sundown sold a respectable but not blockbuster 300,000 copies.
Preminger chose Horton Foote because he admired the writer’s adaptation of another Southern novel, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Otto thought the Texan, whose plays about his home state are suffused with local color, would feel a kinship with the novel’s Southern setting and theme, but he didn’t seem to appreciate that Foote’s quiet style is far removed from the overripe manner of the Gildens, a married couple making their literary debut. “When Otto sent me the book I didn’t like it at all,” Foote recalled.
The authors had done their research all right, but they were not Southerners and nothing was authentic. There was no genuine Southern flavor at all. It was embarrassing. But I was younger then, and egotistical, and I thought I could do something with it. Otto brought my wife and children and me over to London and put us up in a house in Hyde Park where for three months we all lived high on the hog at Otto’s expense.
He was busy filming, but even so I saw him every day. He would make suggestions that I would obediently follow, and he seemed to like what I was doing. He was sharp as a tack. He laughed a lot with me—I guess I was the court jester. He wasn’t working on Bunny Lake every minute, and when he wasn’t he was a wonderful raconteur. And he was very sweet to my children. “Now keep them in line,” he’d say. Working every day with that far-fetched story [about the determination of two sharecroppers, a white man and a black man who have been lifelong friends, to prevent the sale of their adjoining land to corporate developers], I felt I was wrestling with unbeatable material. When I turned in a draft after three months I thought it was good, or at least as good as could be. After reading it—Otto had enormous confidence in his opinion—he said that we had different visions of the material. He wanted more melodrama and ultratheatricality than I gave him. I thought Otto was a wonderful filmmaker, but it wasn’t always my style—his story sense was different from mine. He could have insisted I go on working, but he didn’t. He paid me generously, exactly what he said he was going to. Then he hired Tom Ryan, who had worked for him and the next year had a success adapting Carson McCullers’s Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Later Otto called and asked if he could put my name on the script. I was touched, actually, and I felt I owed it to him. I ask now, however, not to have it on my résumé. I never saw the final script or the film, and I don’t know how much of my work is there. Not much, I suspect.2
At the time Otto hired him, in the summer of 1965, Tom Ryan was in fact his chief reader. “He weighed about three hundred pounds, and when we shared an office at Columbia, he smoked me out,” Hope said. “He was talented and very bright—he was a walking encyclopedia and he retained every fact. Otto appreciated his skills in casting and as a reader. But Tom was bitter about his life: he was an unhappy homosexual who tried several times to commit suicide.”3 In August and September, as he was preparing for the opening of Bunny Lake, Preminger worked closely with Ryan, who was on his staff and in the office every day. He was pleased with Ryan’s approach— Ryan was giving him the “ultratheatricality” the Hollywood melodrama take on the material that he wanted. Over the fall, as he oversaw openings of Bunny Lake, Preminger began to assemble the large cast. To play the sharecroppers who resist selling their land, he chose two newcomers with stage experience, Robert Hooks and John Phillip Law. And in addition to court favorites Burgess Meredith, Doro Merande, and Diahann Carroll, he signed Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Madeleine Sherwood, George Kennedy, Rex Ingram, and—to his infinite regret—Faye Dunaway Because, of course, he wanted to shoot the entire film on location, in Georgia where the Gildens had set the novel, he made several trips in November and December to line up settings. Although he knew the weather would be fierce, he was planning to shoot the film in the dripping humidity of June, July, and August.
In the midst of preproduction on Hurry Sundown he received unwanted headlines for an incident that took place at “21” on January 7, 1966. Seated next to the Premingers, who were dining with
columnist Louis Sobol and his wife, were the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar and his wife Mary. According to Lazar, Otto was determined to provoke an argument over a deal that had gone sour. Two years earlier, as Lazar recalled, Otto had wanted, prepublication, to buy the rights from him to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and have Frank Sinatra star. “I’d given him some hope, but had carefully avoided saying anything binding. Which was just as well—when the book was finished, Truman decided we should sell it to Richard Brooks without inviting other bids. Left out in the cold Otto was miffed.”4 That night at “21,” according to Lazar’s recollection, Otto said that Sinatra was enraged and was planning to beat up the agent. To verify his claim Preminger demanded a phone so he could call Sinatra in Las Vegas at the Sands Hotel. “You’re making it impossible for us to remain here, Otto,” Lazar said. When he and his wife got up to leave, Lazar claimed that Preminger began to insult Mary. “You pitiable creature, I feel sorry for any woman who has to go home and go to bed with that crook,” Otto allegedly said to Mary Lazar. According to her husband, at that point Mrs. Lazar called Otto “a dirty old man” and slapped him. When Preminger rose up from his chair and raised his hand against Mary, Lazar reached for a glass and whacked Otto in the head with it. “Blood was streaming down Otto’s face as Mary and I beat a retreat,” Lazar contended.5 “I regret very much that it happened,” Lazar confided to columnist Earl Wilson. “For people who are not hoodlums these things are always regrettable. But I was provoked.”6
Otto denied that he had insulted Mrs. Lazar or that she had slapped him. “His wife did not take part in this at all,” he told Earl Wilson.7 “The argument had nothing to do with In Cold Blood,” as Hope recollected. “It was about Sinatra and Las Vegas: Swifty told us that he had just come from Sinatra’s opening in Vegas, but Otto knew that couldn’t be true; the opening wasn’t until later. When he said so, Swifty, a strange little man—I don’t know that he liked anyone—got annoyed. He stood, with a glass of scotch in his hand, and hit Otto. Hardly any words had been exchanged. The manager rushed Otto into the men’s room and called the ambulance. I called the police. Otto was conscious, but dazed.” Pictures of Otto exiting the restaurant with a puzzled expression and with his head bleeding profusely—he looked like the subject of a photo by Weegee, the chronicler of New York’s lower depths—were splashed across the next morning’s newspapers.
“The police wrapped his head in a towel and took Otto to New York Hospital, where a plastic surgeon had to remove pieces of glass from Otto’s scalp,” Hope said. “The operation required fifty-one stitches and Otto was in bed for the next three days. When the police asked Otto if he wanted to charge Swifty, Otto called our good friend Louis Nizer, who said yes, to go ahead.”8
In court on January 28, the combatants glared frostily at each other as Lazar pleaded not guilty. “The incident was not Otto’s fault, but because he always played the heavy he took the rap for it,” Hope said. Whatever the cause, the argument certainly reinforced Otto’s image as an ogre, a man you love to hate, and reflected poorly on him as well as Lazar. Both men behaved disgracefully, like petulant children. (A year later, on January 18, 1967, Lazar pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of hitting Preminger, the original felony charge having been reduced months earlier, and was given a suspended sentence. “Otto was not litigious and decided not to sue,” Hope said. Years later, Lazar became a patient of Otto’s son Mark, at the time a cardiology intern. “When Mark asked me if he should become involved in the test I told him, ‘Of course,’ ” Hope said. “Mark told me that Swifty had asked him if he was a fellow who holds a grudge. He certainly is not, any more than Otto was. Mark conducted the test and happily, Swifty survived.”)9
The fracas with Lazar put Otto a few weeks behind on preproduction for Hurry Sundown, but by the beginning of February he was back on track. In late March, about eight weeks before his long-scheduled June 1starting date in Georgia, he had to change location because of a union dispute. When Preminger announced that because of the severe heat he would need to shoot at night and in the early morning starting at 6 a.m., the New York union (which had jurisdiction over the Georgia union) balked. They refused to alter a rigid 8:30 a.m. start time and demanded double time after 4 p.m. Preminger, who paid his crew above scale, claimed the costs of meeting the New York union demands would have been prohibitive. He had budgeted the film at a trim $3,785,000, compared to the $5,440,000 he had allotted the year before for In Harm’s Way, and he was resolved to remain within that sum.
Otto’s production designer, Gene Callahan, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, suggested his home state as a possibility. Otto was persuaded, especially when he found out that Louisiana unions were under the jurisdiction of the Chicago union, more liberal than the one in New York. Still hoping to meet his June 1 starting date, Preminger in early April dispatched Callahan, along with Eva Monley once again his production manager, to line up locations. When they brought him down to Louisiana in late April to examine the sites they had selected, he was satisfied. “Otto trusted Gene on this because Gene was from the Deep South,” as Monley pointed out.10 Nonetheless, Preminger wanted to “enhance” the locations. To fit the needs of the story and, as Willi Frischauer wrote, “to lend verisimilitude to a big flood scene, Preminger hired a large local work force to build a big dam and a reservoir holding seventeen and a half million gallons of water. Cornfields were planted and sharecroppers’ cabins erected.”11
What Gene Callahan did not seem to realize, or what he had omitted mentioning to Preminger, was that they would be filming a story of an interracial friendship in the heart of Ku Klux Klan territory. “It’s like going to the Vatican to make a movie about Martin Luther, or going to a synagogue to make a film about putting down the Jews,” a local observer pointed out.12 Eva Monley booked office space for Otto and rooms for the more than one hundred members of the cast and crew at the Bellemont Motor Hotel, which over the entrance prominently displayed a Confederate flag. Trouble started at once. “It was evident from the first day of shooting that many of the local people didn’t want us there because we had a mixed cast,” Eva Monley said. “One day, on the wall of a set, there was a message from the KKK: ‘Eva Monley, go home.’ To protect me, I was made honorary sheriff. Going to and from the set I changed cars every day”13 Some of the extras and local crew were members of the local Klan, sent to spy and to cause disturbances wherever they could. Tires on company trucks were slashed. One morning at 3 a.m. a burning cross appeared on the set. The day after black and white members of the cast swam together in one of the motel’s two pools, local Klansmen made an abortive attempt to blow it up. “We had dared to pollute their sacred waters by allowing our mixed company to swim in it together,” noted Robert Hooks, who kept a diary of the production. When the manager informed Preminger that “no mixed bathing” was allowed on the premises, the filmmaker promised to remove his entire company from the motel and to default on the payment of the bill unless one pool were set aside for integrated swimming. “During the time that the pool was barred to mixed bathing, my kids said they wouldn’t go without their friends, the children of Diahann Carroll and Robert Hooks, who had come along with their parents at Otto’s insistence,” Hope said.14 The pool was integrated, but, as Hooks wrote, the Klan “labeled us ‘that nigger pitcher’ and they were determined to get us out of there, one way or another.” After armed state troopers were brought in to guard the wing of the motel where the cast and crew were housed, many of the actors began to feel as if they were under house arrest, their discomfort spiked by the paralyzing heat and humidity during summer on the bayou.
“It was beginning to dawn on us just what kind of place we had landed in,” Hooks noted.
The lesson was learned in somewhat different ways by different members of the cast. When Michael Caine was walking in downtown Baton Rouge with his friend [the journalist] David Lewin, a paunchy cop recognized him, which was not unusual, although his response was not what Michael was used to hearing from
his fans. The sheriff looked him up and down and said he didn’t want him [or any of the actors in the film] in his town and he’d “bettah get his nigga-lovin’ ass the hell outah heah.” Michael was speechless. He hadn’t really believed what it was like in the American South in those days. But he did now.15
When Caine, along with Jane Fonda, Diahann Carroll, Rex Ingram, and Hooks drove into New Orleans one night, they were refused entrance at Brennan’s, a famous restaurant. “Michael could barely control his anger,” as Hooks recalled. “He asked the man if he knew who we were. The man did, but it made no difference. ‘What do you mean it doesn’t make any difference?’ Jane jumped in. She was ready to draw blood. The man said finally with a trace of irritation in his deep Southern drawl, ‘Say, don’t chall unnastan’? We don’ ’low no niggers in hyah. Thass it.’ Movie stars or not, in New Orleans in 1966, if you were black or hung out with blacks, Southern hospitality suddenly became Southern hostility.”16
On the way back to the Bellemont from a location one evening, as a line of cars and trucks was moving through a heavily wooded area, the twilight silence was abruptly shattered by a volley of gunshots. “We were being shot at by people we didn’t know, couldn’t see, and couldn’t defend ourselves against,” Hooks reported. “We were in a war in our own country.” The barrage lasted less than a minute before the Klansmen departed into the steaming wilderness. “Several windshields were blasted out and the sides of the
110° in the shade: A lunch break, with linen tablecloths, silverware, and good china, during shooting for Hurry Sundown, filmed on location in the summertime heat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Otto Preminger Page 49