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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 1/3/2026

Otto Preminger

Before I started watching the complete filmography of Otto Preminger, I didn't really know what I was going to get. Oh, sure, I'd seen the highlights. I'd seen Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, and Laura, but he completed nearly forty films in his nearly fifty years making movies. Could I say that those three films were representative of him?

It's not like Laura and the other two have a whole lot in common, but you could draw lines of comparison, but what about Forever Amber or The Moon is Blue or Bonjour Tristesse or Hurry Sundown? What do they have to say about Preminger? Well, that's why I do these runs, so that I can find out.

And you know what I found out about Otto Preminger?

I do not think he was a very good filmmaker.

Eras

I can't say that. He made a few good movies. That means he must be at least good, right? Well, let me talk about his career. I could break it into four distinct periods, but I think it amounts to two pairs where those that make up the pairs aren't different enough to talk about at this high level. So, I'll settle with two: his Fox era and his independent era.

If I have to pick one of the two eras to keep, it would be the Fox era. It's probably the most uneven, but it demonstrates a professionalism in the final products that I don't think most of the independent era have. That's all about Preminger being a cog in the studio system, reporting to Daryl Zanuck, a man who hated Preminger, and having a stable of actors, technicians, and writers around him to cover up what his independent period would reveal to be huge gaps in Preminger's own skillset. So, while we do get drudgery like Forever Amber, a production Preminger was brought in to save after Zanuck fired the original director after a month (none of the original director's footage is in the film) which ends up being a rush job with no real positives, we also get something like Laura, a production Preminger was able to foster within the system as producer until Zanuck fired the director and let Preminger take over.

So, this period has some real highs, like Where the Sidewalk Ends and some real lows, like Kidnapped, but there is this overall professionalism to the films that trends towards the pretty good. Preminger had his highs, his lows, but mostly he was making perfectly competent entertainment with some consistency.

And then, during the production of River of No Return, Preminger got sick of Zanuck and the system and bought out his own contract for $150,000, striking out in the independence. His next production was Carmen Jones (which, ironically, was financed with Fox money though Preminger's production company was independent), an adaptation of the Broadway musical adaptation of the opera Carmen that transports the action to the American South. Watching this, I felt like we were getting a new direction: bold musicals with some kind of progressive emphasis without being didactic about anything like politics.

That's not really what we got.

Independence


When I want to split the independent period in two (the Fox period would be split because of two separate Fox contracts with a gap in the middle), I want to split it in 1959 when he adapts both Porgy and Bess, the Gershwin opera, and Anatomy of a Murder. It's this split between what feels like a focus on the theatrical and a focus on the adaptation of large novels.

Anyway, what matters is Preminger's independence to do what he wants, and I think there are some key examples to pull about how he kind of didn't know what he was doing. The first is Saint Joan, an adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play, the screenplay written by Graham Greene, that I feel falls flat on its face. It's visually boring while distilling a three hour play to about 90 minutes, and it ends up feeling like a clip show of the events of Joan of Arc's life with Jean Seberg playing the central role, and she's awful. I've never quite understood the French obsession with her in the 50s (Godard called her the greatest actress alive), but she's deeply unconvincing in everything I've seen (yes, even Breathless), and Preminger directs her terribly. She's slightly better in Bonjour Tristesse, but I think that's mostly about better casting (she plays a flippant childlike woman as opposed to the zealous saint), and Preminger not only directed her, he cast her. Producing his own movies independently, she was his sole choice, and he got what he wanted, and she's awful.

Next, we have to talk about the string of adaptations of novels.

Yes, we do get Anatomy of a Murder, which is great, but we also get The Cardinal, which feels like a frustrating biopic, In Harm's Way which has its fans but I feel is just flabby especially in its very long middle section, Hurry Sundown which is really just a collection of subplots without a real narrative center, Exodus which is so long that its length is a source of one of the great anecdotes of Hollywood ("Otto, let my people go!" at the three hour mark during the premiere), and Advise and Consent which pushes so much melodrama into the final act that it almost feels like a parody (I mean...I enjoy the film). There are basic script issues, even in films I like, that make me wonder...why did he let all of those problems through? What did he say to his writers that kept these issues in movie after movie?

And I simply come to the conclusion that his time both as a theatrical director (his job in Germany before he emigrated and where he went after his first Fox contract expired) and his time as a cog in the Fox machine where he constantly took jobs of finishing films for other directors (he did it twice for Ernst Lubitsch on A Foreign Affair and That Lady in Ermine) created this habit in him to just accept the writer's work. He refused vision over the script, trusting that the other creatives were doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. Except, that's not what happens in the studio system. Teams of writers were reworking scripts all of the time, trying to make them better under producer direction.

If you're going to put your name prominently on every poster (almost all designed by Saul Bass and look great, by the way) and prominently display his "produced and directed by" credits, one expects him to exert creative control, and I struggled to find where he did that. His movies were generic looking overall. His noirs looked like noirs, his comedies looked like comedies, his dramas like dramas. Performances could be good (seriously, Dana Andrews' best performances are under Preminger) or terrible (Seberg). The scripts could be great but mostly had issues that kept them back. There was no real connective tissue except perhaps a generalized desire to be controversial (M*A*S*H* has an episode about the disappointing "controversy" around The Moon is Blue) and perhaps something about the abuse of power, but it's all hidden by issue-filled scripts.

Legacy


I hate slagging on directors long since dead, but Preminger's films overall frustrated me. For every movie I loved, like Where the Sidewalk Ends, I'd be met with movies I might like but felt like just needed a little bit here or there to elevate them. And when that happens with something like 90% of his films, the common factor becomes Preminger himself. Not his rotating stables of writers, cinematographers, or actors (the only one who seemed able to stand him was Burgess Meredith who worked with him a bunch late in their careers). And then there'd be the movies that bored me like Forever Amber or seemed to just miss the point like A Foreign Affair.

And yet, his legacy will be his best films, and that's a good thing. The bad ones, the frustrating ones, the incomplete ones, fade away with time, leaving only movies like Anatomy of a Murder or Laura. His final slate of films, almost all adaptations of unremarkable books like Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon or Such Good Friends get dismissed as a late downturn in favor of the masterpieces he left behind.

Well, I just think the masterpieces are the result of either a machine working well (Where the Sidewalk Ends) or blind luck (Anatomy of a Murder). Preminger himself? Well, I think almost anyone could have made those movies just as well.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

We Bury the Dead

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Rosebud (Rating 1/4) Full Review "However, it's not nearly enough in a largely dull, disconnected film that really only exists because Preminger was trying his hand at nepotism." [Tubi]

Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Towards the tail end of Preminger's career, all I have is questions, mostly about why he kept doing it." [YouTube]

Skidoo (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Funny people given nothing funny to do except mug for the camera while Preminger plows through production without ever considering what could have been done to make things actually funny." [Plex]

Bunny Lake is Missing (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's more focused and, largely, more effective. I think it still reveals issues with how Preminger approached adaptations, but it's a pretty good time at the movies nonetheless." [Library]

The Cardinal (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, I actually really liked the film for about two hours. And then…it just repeated itself in major sections that ended up feeling isolated events rather than extensions of a character's journey." [YouTube]

Advise and Consent (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I still don't think Preminger brought much to each film artistically, but perhaps he was just becoming better at being able to choose projects. That's far from nothing." [YouTube]

Exodus (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's an unfortunate situation because I thought the film up to the point was interesting, if not quite coalescing into a whole. It could have been more, but it wasn't. Oh well." [Kanopy]

Anatomy of a Murder (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Is it Preminger's best film? I wouldn't quite go that far, but it is a great procedural legal drama that feels surprisingly light on its feet for its extended runtime." [Personal Collection]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 1/24 and it will discuss the directing career of Wolfgang Petersen.

Also, please view my YouTube videos from the last couple of weeks:

Public Domain Day 2026
Akira Kurosawa - The Definitive Ranking
Akira Kurosawa - The Directors Series
Ernst Lubitsch - The Definitive Ranking
Ernst Lubitsch - The Directors Series