Joe's View

The jury has always been out on Otto Preminger’s merits as a director —most critics see him as a minor figure, but a loyal cult following believes there are great visual and thematic qualities in pictures such as “Advise and Consent” (1962) and “In Harm’s Way” (1965). Everyone agrees Preminger was a great showman who knew how to sell his films and a fearless opponent of film censorship.
The producer-director is the subject of a juicy new Knopf biography, “Otto Preminger” by Foster Hirsch.
New York’s Film Forum is sponsoring a Preminger series in conjunction with the book that is running through Jan. 17. Thursday night, Fairfield actor Keir Dullea will speak at the 7:30 p.m. showing of a newly restored print of the 1965 Preminger thriller, “Bunny Lake is Missing.”
In his prime, Preminger was second only to Alfred Hitchcock in his ability to personally generate news stories and to book important talk show appearances for each one of his pictures. Moviegoers knew the Preminger name and face (at a time when most directors were behind the scenes figures) because he was such a frequent and amusing TV talk show guest.
Like another hammy director, John Huston, the Vienna-born Preminger took on a very high visibility acting job — as a Nazi officer in the Billy Wilder classic “Stalag 17” (1953) — that gave him a leg up on the competition.
Throughout his Hollywood heyday running roughly from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Preminger was also well known for his dictatorial manner on the sets of his movies. Tom Tryon who starred in “The Cardinal” (1963), Dyan Cannon who starred in “Such Good Friends” (1971) and Dullea were just three of the many actors who went public with their horror stories of being mistreated on Preminger sets.
Hirsch’s book is much juicier than the average Hollywood biography because he was able to get on-the-record interviews with actors and crew members who were more than willing to tell battle stories.
Dullea pointed out to Hirsch that no actor ever gave the best performance of his or her career in a Preminger film: “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…I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.”
According to Hirsch, Preminger only met his match in the nastiness sweepstakes a few times.
On the set of “Hurry Sundown” (1967), cast and crew couldn’t decide who was worse, Preminger or the pre-“Bonnie and Clyde” Faye Dunaway.
Tensions were already high because of the oppressive Louisiana location heat and threats from the Ku Klux Klan over the black actors staying in the same hotel with the white cast and crew:
“For the only time in his career, Preminger’s ‘whipping boy’ did not have the sympathy of the cast and crew, because Faye Dunaway, hard-bitten, competitive, and self-centered, managed to alienate everyone.”
One member of the crew reports: “She took over an air-conditioned trailer and banished dear Diahann Carroll who was to have shared the trailer with her. She made Diahann learn her lines outside the trailer, in the heat.”
“Otto Preminger” mixes gossipy anecdotes from the director’s sets with smart reassessments of the qualities of each film. Hirsch believes Preminger was always underrated and he makes a reader want to return to pictures like “Exodus” (1960) and “Advise and Consent” for another look.
(Film Forum is at 209 West Houston St. in Manhattan. For more information on tickets for the “Preminger” series call 212-727-8110 or visit filmforum.org.)

Conservative movie scolds like columnist Michael Medved often write that Hollywood filmmakers have an “anti-business” bias that permeates movies and TV.
From my perspective, however, there are too many American movies about gangsters and crooked politicians and too few pictures about the lives of the capitalist barons who have always had the ultimate power in this country.
Yes, there have been marvelously evil characters like Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street” and Noah Cross in “Chinatown” and that bellowing tycoon Ned Beatty played in “Network” who embody the anything-for-a-buck business credo, but guys like that are usually kept on the fringes of a story — they’re presented as villains who provide terrific contrast with the heroes who try to vanquish them.
What makes the new Paul Thomas Anderson picture “There Will Be Blood” so unusual is that the businessman monster character occupies the center of the film and we are forced to study what makes him tick.
Only an uncompromising actor — with no image concerns — such as Daniel Day-Lewis would be willing to play oilman Daniel Plainview who amasses a fortune by any means necessary, pushing family and would-be friends away as he keeps his eyes on the prize.
Anderson makes this nasty story palatable through sheer filmmaking savvy — the picture is stunning to look at from start to finish and has a strikingly innovative musical score by Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) — but it is a harrowing reminder of the money madness that dominates our whole culture.
The Plainviews of our day don’t even have national loyalty, as their business interests have broken free to encircle the globe.
Ironically, the source material for the movie is “Oil!,” a novel by the socialist writer Upton Sinclair, who dared to run for governor in California in the 1930s only to have his character smashed (and his campaign derailed) by a series of propaganda newsreels funded by big business and put together by the moguls who ran Hollywood in those days.

Biographies tend to fall into one of two categories — trashy cut-and-paste affairs that stress personal scandal over professional accomplishment, or exhaustively footnoted tomes that keep us at a slight remove from important figures.
What makes Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon Books) so special is that the writer gives us a full account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and career on stage at the same time that she provides an unsparing view of the man’s wildly dramatic — and sometimes sordid — personal life.
Kavanagh trained in ballet before she turned to journalism, so she has a special appreciation of Nureyev’s devotion to dance and the excitement he generated in the West after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961.
Nureyev had already established himself as one of the great young dancers in Russia when he decided to bolt in Paris, from a state-sanctioned tour.
Because this happened at the height of the Cold War, the decision made headlines all over the world and gave Nureyev instant international celebrity.
What Kavanagh makes clear is that the young man’s decision was a purely aesthetic one — he was desperate to break out of the classical tradition of Russian ballet and to explore what was happening in the world of modern dance and to connect with innovators such as his fellow Russian George Balanchine (whose mixture of classical technique and innovative choreography made New York City Ballet into what was perhaps the greatest dance troupe of that time).
Nureyev’s explosive entry into the West raised the profile of dance and made the Russian a household name, what one chronicler quoted by Kavanagh called “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.”
The dancer was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” was photographed by Richard Avedon and hobnobbed with the international jet set.
Behind the scenes, Nureyev became infamous for his explosive temper and often whimsical demands, but Kavanagh presents him as a phenomenal work horse, maintaining a punishing schedule that kept him traveling almost constantly for 30 years.
Even the man’s critics admit he brought new life to the ballet, sparking a personal renaissance in the career of his superstar partner Margot Fonteyn (who seemed to be nearing the end of her distinguished career when Nureyev pushed her to a new plateau).
Kavanagh writes of Fonteyn: “She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and ‘really dance for the first time.’”
Nureyev and Fonteyn were swept into the 1960s lifestyle revolutions along with pop stars, generating page one news when they attended a San Francisco party that ended with a drug bust.
The book delves into Nureyev’s apparently insatiable sex drive, but in a way that makes it clear that hedonism was one of the dancer’s few personal outlets. Kavanagh separates the many one night (one hour?) stands in the artist’s life from his great love for fellow dancer Erik Bruhn and other attachments that were nearly as intense.
The sadness of any dancer’s limited time on stage was intensified by Nureyev finding out in the early 1980s that he was HIV positive. He spent the subsequent decade filling his schedule with as many jobs as he could find, with sidetracks into theater (a disastrous tour of “The King and I”) and conducting classical music. The way that he kept going right to the bitter end (in 1993) is both poignant and inspiring.
Kavanagh tells Nureyev’s story so dramatically — and tells us so much about the world of dance beyond her subject’s life — that few readers will complain about the 698-page length of her account.