The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (334 page)

Preminger turned the postwar Fox thriller away from urban neorealism to an interest in people under pressure and a series of fascinating character studies: in
Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends
, and
The 13th Letter
, our predisposition to take sides is undercut by the all-round picture of people.
Whirlpool
is interesting not as a picture of a hypnotist mastermind, but in the way that the Gene Tierney character harbors all the feelings of unreliability imposed on her by Jose Ferrer.

Just as the thrillers defy expectations, so his two women’s pictures
—Fallen Angel
and
Daisy Kenyon
—treat melodrama with an extraordinary lack of hysteria. Alone among Hollywood directors, Preminger triumphs in that genre by deflecting it. Rather than inducing the passion that underlies it—in the way of Frank Borzage, Stahl, or Sirk—he eases it in the direction of documentary. The camera style is implacably objective, observant of such detail that, in
Daisy Kenyon
, even Joan Crawford is made touching. For all his Viennese origins, Preminger’s cool is never spiked on Wilder’s cynicism or warmed by Ophulsian tenderness. He is essentially lucid, as convinced as Renoir of everyone having their reasons and enriching his films with doubt. The process is unique, and if it is best used in the later films, it was present from the beginning.

The four lengthy disquisitions on the pillars of civilization are all entertaining films, packed with incident and remarkable characters. But, notably, they all end unexpectedly:
Exodus
in suspension;
The Cardinal
in doubt;
Advise and Consent
with the process of carrying on regardless; and
Anatomy of a Murder
on the sharpest probe into our complacency that Preminger has ever launched. The film has concerned the efforts of attorney James Stewart to defend Ben Gazzara against a charge of having murdered a man who may have raped his wife, Lee Remick. The personalities of the actors are crucial. Stewart has always commanded the naïve, gangling, provincial hero: in no other film has that command been so revealed as mechanism. Thus the traditionally devoted defense attorney—the idiotic Perry Mason—is shown as a true professional, himself an actor in a play before the court, trying to convince himself that his client is innocent. That client is Gazzara at his most calculatingly insolent, barely troubling to conceal his own violence. Lee Remick as the wife makes no effort to disguise her provocative sensuality.

In other words, we are put in the position of the jury: the workings of the film become the due process of law. Gazzara is acquitted on the esoteric defense of “irresistible impulse.” When Stewart calls for his fee, Gazzara has left a note on his wife’s tarty shoe—he had an irresistible impulse to get out of town. Irony does not actually detract from the nobility of the law as an instrument reluctant to make up its mind about people. Preminger’s enquiring camera—always tracking with characters, rarely separating people engaged with one another—is the manifestation of intelligent reticence, and it produced half a dozen great movies.

It must be admitted that Preminger on several occasions foundered with unsuitable material—
Forever Amber, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Porgy and Bess
, and all the movies from 1968 onward—as if he only needed to relax to become the buffoon director one might expect from his camp commandant in
Stalag 17
(53, Wilder).

It should also be said that this brief account of his central achievement has neglected the brilliance of
Angel Face
and
Bonjour Tristesse
, movies that both deal with scheming malice in a young girl—the first as melodrama, the second as a considerable deepening of Françoise Sagan’s novel. Incidentally, they contain probably the best screen performances from Jean Simmons and Jean Seberg. It is a tribute to Preminger’s objectivity that Seberg’s girl in
Bonjour Tristesse
and her
Saint Joan
are treated with the same interested caution.

Elvis Presley
(1935–77), b. Tupelo, Mississippi
There is a tradition of singers who made a string of movies because of their proven following. But is there a greater contrast between energy and routine than that between Elvis Presley the phenomenon, live and on record, and Presley the automaton on film? His movies still play on television. But Presley now is in a kind of retreat, and I can believe that in another ten years the movies will be reclaimed with camp glee for their specious, monotonous “youthfulness”—so wholesome, so bouncy, and so riotously clean when set against what we know of the real Presley. There are exceptions: he gives a genuine performance in
Flaming Star
(60, Don Siegel); the Clifford Odets script for
Wild in the Country
(61, Philip Dunne) works well, and Tuesday Weld and John Ireland get under the flaccid dude’s skin; there are numbers with Ann-Margret in
Viva Las Vegas
(64, George Sidney)—notably “What’d I Say?”—that expose the soporific air of most Presley films.

So it is a list of titles more suggestive than the movies:
Love Me Tender
(56, Robert D. Webb);
Loving You
(57, Hal Kanter);
Jailhouse Rock
(57, Richard Thorpe);
King Creole
(58, Michael Curtiz),
G.I. Blues
(60, Norman Taurog);
Wild in the Country; Blue Hawaii
(62, Taurog);
Follow That Dream
(62, Gordon Douglas);
Kid Galahad
(62, Phil Karlson);
Fun in Acapulco
(63, Thorpe);
It Happened at the World’s Fair
(63, Taurog);
Viva Las Vegas; Roustabout
(64, John Rich);
Tickle Me
(65, Taurog);
Girl Happy
(65, Boris Sagal);
Frankie and Johnnie
(66, Frederick de Cordova);
Paradise Hawaiian Style
(66, Michael Moore);
Double Trouble
(67, Taurog);
Speedway
(68, Taurog); and
Stay Away Joe
(68, Peter Tewkesbury). He had a straight role in
Charro!
(69, Charles Marquis Warren), and his best recording of live performance in
Elvis—That’s the Way It Is
(70, Denis Sanders).

Edward R. Pressman
, b. New York, 1943
Ed Pressman is the son of a New York toy manufacturer. He was supposed to follow along in that business, but as he went off to Stanford and the London School of Economics, so he began to get a taste for film. It was in meeting Paul Williams that he found his own role as enabler or producer for adventurous material. Ed is quiet, patient, tenacious, careful with money; but he is open to all manner of imaginative ideas and unlikely ventures. As such, he is an essential figure in American independent cinema, a good friend to many (me included), and someone to whom nearly every out-of-the-mainstream filmmaker has turned at some time or other. Are all his films good? Of course not. But are any of them dull? Let the list speak for itself.

Out of It
(69, Williams);
The Revolutionary
(70, Williams);
Dealing
(72, Williams);
Badlands
(73, Terrence Malick);
Sisters
(73, Brian De Palma);
Phantom of the Paradise
(74, De Palma);
Despair
(78, Rainer Werner Fassbinder);
Paradise Alley
(78, Sylvester Stallone);
Old Boyfriends
(79, Joan Tewkesbury);
Heart Beat
(80, John Byrum);
Victoria
(80, Bo Widerberg);
The Hand
(81, Oliver Stone);
Conan the Barbarian
(82, John Milius);
Das Boot
(82, Wolfgang Petersen);
The Pirates of Penzance
(83, Wilford Leach);
Plenty
(85, Fred Schepisi);
Crimewave
(86, Sam Raimi);
Half Moon Street
(86, Bob Swaim);
True Stories
(86, David Byrne);
Cherry 2000
(87, Steve De Jarnatt);
Good Morning, Babylon
(87, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani);
Masters of the Universe
(87, Gary Goddard);
Walker
(87, Alex Cox);
Wall Street
(87, Stone);
Talk Radio
(88, Stone);
Paris by Night
(89, David Hare);
Blue Steel
(90, Kathryn Bigelow);
Martians Go Home
(90, David Odell);
Waiting for the Light
(90, Chris Monger);
To Sleep with Anger
(90, Charles Burnett);
Reversal of Fortune
(90, Barbet Schroeder);
Iron Maze
(91, Hiro Yoshida);
Homicide
(91, David Mamet);
Year of the Gun
(91, John Frankenheimer);
Storyville
(92, Mark Frost);
Bad Lieutenant
(92, Abel Ferrara);
Hoffa
(92, Danny DeVito);
Dream Lover
(94, Nicholas Kazan);
The Crow
(94, Alex Proyas);
Street Fighter
(94, Steven de Souza);
Judge Dredd
(95, Danny Cannon);
City Hall
(95, Harold Becker);
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(96, Frankenheimer);
The Crow: City of Angels
(96, Tim Pope);
The Winter Guest
(97, Alan Rickman);
Black Out
(97, Ferrara);
Two Girls and a Guy
(98, James Toback);
New Rose Hotel
(98, Ferrara);
Legionnaire
(99, Peter MacDonald);
Endurance
(99, Leslie Woodhead);
Black and White
(00, Toback);
The Crow: Salvation
(00, Bharat Nalluri);
American Psycho
(00, Mary Harron);
Harvard Man
(01, Toback);
The Endurance
(01, George Butler);
10th Victim
(02, Josef Rusnak);
The Cooler
(03, Wayne Kramer);
Owning Mahowny
(03, Richard Kwietniowski);
Love Object
(03, Robert Parigi);
Beautiful Country
(04, Hans Petter Moland);
The Crow: Wicked Prayer
(04, Lance Mungla);
Undertow
(04, David Gordon Green);
The King
(05, James Marsh);
Thank You for Smoking
(05, Jason Reitman);
Driving Lessons
(06, Jeremy Brock);
Fur
(06, Steven Shainburg);
Amazing Grace
(06, Michael Apted);
Sisters
(06, Arthur Allan Seidelman);
Mutant Chronicles
(08, Simon Hunter);
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans
(09, Werner Herzog);
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
(10, Stone).

Dennis Price
(Dennistoun Franklyn John Rose-Price) (1915–73), b. Twyford, Berkshire
Just as one longs to hear the liquid insolence of Dennis Price’s voice reciting his full name, so what a gruesome poem he could have made of a selection from his more than a hundred pictures. “What am I doing? Oh, I just finished
Les Expériences Érotiques de Frankenstein …
or
What a Carve Up!…
or
Time Is My Enemy.”
Just think: a hundred pictures and not even sixty years old, going from Hamer to Hammer (that is Michael Newton’s joke, from his excellent monograph on
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, which takes time to tell the mournful yet irresistible story of Price). After one suicide attempt, he is supposed to have murmured, on coming round, “What glory, Price!”

The son of a brigadier general, he went to Radley and Oxford, did a little West End, joined the Royal Artillery, was wounded and became an understudy to Noël Coward. Thus in 1944, he got his first film role in
A Canterbury Tale
(44, Michael Powell), after Powell had seen him onstage and found him “impudently well-mannered.” He rose quickly and would become a Rank contract artist:
A Place of One’s Own
(45, Bernard Knowles);
Caravan
(46, Arthur Crabtree);
The Magic Bow
(46, Knowles);
Hungry Hill
(47, Brian Desmond Hurst);
Jassy
(47, Knowles);
The White Unicorn
(47, Knowles);
Dear Murderer
(47, Crabtree);
Snowbound
(48, David MacDonald);
Holiday Camp
(48, Ken Annakin);
Easy Money
(48, Knowles);
The Dancing Years
(48, Harold French);
Good Time Girl
(49, MacDonald).

That’s when he got the role of Louis Mazzini for Robert Hamer in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
—maybe the wittiest of all film noirs, and the first plain image of Oscar Wilde on the screen. Price was begging to play that part. Instead, he was set up for a great fall in the very silly
The Bad Lord Byron
(49, MacDonald), which put him into eclipse and confirmed his own modesty about himself.

He did not recover (which may also speak to how disturbing
Kind Hearts
was) but soldiered on:
Murder Without Crime
(50, J. Lee Thompson);
The Adventurers
(51, MacDonald);
Lady Godiva Rides Again
(51, Frank Launder);
Song of Paris
(52, John Guillermin);
The Tall Headlines
(53, Terence Young);
The Intruder
(54, Guy Hamilton);
For Better, for Worse
(54, Thompson);
That Lady
(55, Young);
Oh … Rosalinda!
(55, Powell and Emeric Pressburger);
Private’s Progress
(56, John Boulting);
Port Afrique
(56, Rudolph Maté);
Charley Moon
(56, Hamilton);
Fortune Is a Woman
(57, Sidney Gilliat);
I’m All Right, Jack
(59, Boulting).

Of course, it was all supporting work: so he was Ross, watching Robert Morley in
Oscar Wilde
(60, Gregory Ratoff);
School for Scoundrels
(60, Hamer—by then, they were both alcoholic);
Tunes of Glory
(60, Ronald Neame);
Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s
(60, Launder);
The Millionairess
(60, Anthony Asquith);
No Love for Johnnie
(61, Ralph Thomas);
The Rebel
(61, Robert Day);
Watch It, Sailor!
(61, Wolf Rilla); not brave enough to be gay in
Victim
(61, Basil Dearden)—though in life he was;
Behave Yourself
(62, Michael Winner);
Play It Cool
(62, Winner);
The Cool Mikado
(62, Winner); briefly reunited with Joan Greenwood in
The Amorous Prawn
(62, Anthony Kimmins);
Tamahine
(63, Philip Leacock);
The V.I.P.s
(63, Asquith);
The Horror of It All
(63, Fisher).