The Otto Preminger Collection Blu-ray Review
Summer (and Fall, Winter and Spring) Camp
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 25, 2012
Note: the scores above are averages of the three films together. See below for individual scores.
Otto Preminger loved pushing the envelope, and a number of his films, while seeming fairly passé today, were the
subject of major controversies when they were released. As incredible as it may sound, Preminger's film version of
The Moon is Blue was the focus of a major
cause célèbre due to its perceived sanguine approach toward
sex, something that will strike anyone seeing the film nowadays as positively weird. Preminger, ever the master
showman, played the controversy for all it was worth, releasing the film without the vaunted Breen office Seal of
Approval, and made the film into one of the blockbusters of the early fifties. Several more films in the fifties and sixties
caused various ruckuses.
Carmen Jones featured a largely African American cast and once again toyed with
illicit seduction. A couple of years later Preminger caused headlines again when he tackled the subject of drug addiction
in
The Man With the Golden Arm. 1959 saw the release of both Preminger's film of
Porgy and Bess, a
well meaning if flawed adaptation that has been tied up in rights issues with the Gershwin Estate (which hated the film)
and has rarely if ever been seen in the intervening years since its theatrical release, and what has become probably
Preminger's most critically lauded film of this era,
Anatomy of a Murder.
That film created a sensation due to its then remarkably candid
discussions involving sex and rape.
While Preminger's 1960 film of Leon Uris'
Exodus wasn't as patently
controversial as some of his previous works, it continued Preminger's tendency of being an
agent provocateur,
at least behind the scenes, when the director started pounding the nails in the coffin of the blacklist by hiring Dalton
Trumbo under his own name to write the screenplay. Two years later Preminger offered
Advise and Consent, a
film which wasn't circumspect about portraying homosexuality in the highest levels of government. Sandwiched before,
after and in between this mere handful of films mentioned above are several other Preminger pieces, many of which are
undisputed classics in their own right (
Laura) or at least highly regarded if acknowledged as being somewhat
flawed (
The Cardinal). But the sixties saw a perhaps predictable decline in Preminger's directorial fortunes, and
few would accord his later films the same accolades that were regularly bestowed on his earlier works. That said,
there's virtually no Preminger film that doesn't have
something to recommend it, even if that something is
nothing other than camp value. The three films in this new box set may well be in that category, but they each also are
distinctive in at least a couple of other elements as well, not the least of which is the window they offer into Preminger's
late sixties and early seventies mindset.
Hurry, Sundown
Film: 2.0 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Camp Value: 4.0 stars
Preminger evidently optioned the novel of
Hurry, Sundown before it was ever published, expecting it to be some
sort of latter day
Gone With the Wind. He couldn't have been more wrong. The film, which is basically a
convoluted tale of land rights woven around several family stories, both black and white, is just a patently odd
combination of melodrama and outright camp. How else to properly explain Michael Caine as a greedy southern
investor (and amateur saxophone player, no less) married to a coquettish Jane Fonda, whose "mammy" (the incredible
Beah Richards) owns some land that Caine's character needs to get a hold of. There's another parcel at stake owned
by John Phillip Law and his wife, hard working mother of four Faye Dunaway (in one of her first starring roles). Also on
hand are Robert Hooks as Richards' grandson, Diahann Carroll as a local teacher and Hooks' kind of love interest, and
Frank Converse as Fonda's cousin, a newly consecrated Priest who has the temerity to serve communion to the town's
blacks right alongside the whites, angering the local judge (Burgess Meredith). (Interestingly, Hooks and Converse
would go right into co-starring roles on
N.Y.P.D., a great old cop show which was a brief but substantial hit for
ABC in the late sixties).
The film is obviously a well intentioned attempt to illumine the horrible discrimination that blacks suffered at the hands
of bigoted whites, but placing the film in the immediate post-World War II era distances it from what could have been
its own era's (1967) obviously visceral dealings with race relations. There are a number of just downright weird
moments in this film, none more so than when Caine and Fonda's afflicted child (described by Dunaway in a semi-
hilarious scene as "peculiar") just starts screaming, apparently for no reason (something that happens repeatedly
throughout the film).
Hurry, Sundown made headlines of its own during production, but not for any substantial reasons. The cast
evidently was near mutiny due to Preminger's autocratic ways (Dunaway later sued to be let out of a five film deal she
had signed with the director, something that evidently cost her a small fortune to settle, but which she more or less
happily paid in order to never have to work with him again). Preminger also had some unavoidable issues of his own to
deal with, including local Georgia racism (which to his credit, he stood up against) and a late in the shoot replacement of
his cinematographer due to an injury. There's some especially haphazard editing on display throughout this outing,
something that's really quite odd for a Preminger film, with some scenes just coming to an abrupt halt almost in mid-
sentence as if either the director or editor wanted to get away from something
really ridiculous happening.
Easy listening maestro Hugo Montenegro contributes one of his very few film scores to the project, working a kind of
quasi-Copland territory that is too contemporary sounding for the movie's supposed forties setting. The film can
therefore only be charitably described as something of a mess.
Skidoo
Film: 3.0 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Camp Value: 5.0 stars
To paraphrase a certain famous commercial featuring an egg frying in a pan, "This is Otto Preminger." (Pause). "This is
Otto Preminger
on drugs." Perhaps it was understandable after the disaster of
Hurry, Sundown that
Preminger would need to turn to mind altering drugs like LSD to recover (I jest, but only slightly), but evidently that's
exactly what happened with regard to
Skidoo. And according to rumors which still fly around about the shoot of
this extremely (as in
extremely) odd 1968 feature, the director wasn't alone in the sugar cube swallowing
business. (Some reports indicate it may have only been Groucho Marx who consumed the drug in preparation for the
film, but anyone watching
Skidoo would be hard pressed not to think that Preminger was under the sway of
some mind altering substance during the film.)
It's possible to give a plot summary of
Skidoo but that hardly even comes close to capturing the complete
anarchy that runs rampant throughout this film. Jackie Gleason plays a retired hitman who is married to a frenetic Carol
Channing. Their daughter (Alexandra Hay) has fallen in love with a hippie (John Phillip Law, evidently not having
learned his lesson about working with the director). Gleason is ordered by another crime family (played by Cesar
Romero and Frankie Avalon) that the city's mob boss (Groucho Marx) has ordered Gleason to kill another mobster
(Mickey Rooney) who's being kept in a kind of high tech version of Alcatraz.
That's the basic plot of
Skidoo but that's a bit like saying
War and Peace is about Russia.
There are no doubt some looking at the 3.0 star rating above and thinking this
reviewer must be on some mind
altering drug, but there's a certain joyous cacophony to
Skidoo that I personally find irresistible. The film is
quite simply like nothing you've ever seen. That doesn't necessarily make it good, mind you, and it's frequently quite
noisy and busy to absolutely no avail, but it is just so patently
odd that I can't help but like it, despite my
awareness of its complete inanity. When you have Jackie Gleason dropping acid in a prison and hallucinating Mickey
Rooney doing a song and dance with bags of money, you really are
forced to cut the film a little slack, at least in
my way of looking at things.
Skidoo has some charming songs by Harry Nilsson, and it also has two bookending elements that are quite
remarkable in their own way. The opening has a pretty funny trip through late sixties television with
faux
advertisements (including Fat Cola), along with what is supposed to be a broadcast of Preminger's own bloated war
epic
In Harm's Way. The ending on the other hand has the credits
sung by Nilsson, probably one of the
few times (if not the
only time) that's happened in a major feature film.
Such Good Friends
Film: 3.0 stars
Video: 2.5 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Camp Value: 2.0 stars
There must be tons of people out there with a deep, burning desire to see Burgess Meredith dancing naked, and for
that vast population
Such Good Friends is
your film! I'll just go out on a limb and state that for the
rest of us, this is a decidedly mixed bag, although whether or not you end up in the "pro" or "con" camp
probably will depend on how black your sense of humor is. Much as with
Hurry, Sundown, Preminger optioned
the book on which
Such Good Friends was based before it was published. In this particular case, his prescience
paid off as the book became a bestseller and the film version was a hotly anticipated property. It still got bogged down
in development hell, however, with several screenwriters attached at one point or another and eventual lead scenarist
Elaine May so disappointed with the final version that she only allowed her contributions to be included under a
pseudonym, which of course didn't prevent Preminger from widely advertising the fact that May was involved anyway.
Such Good Friends concerns a harried housewife and mother played by Dyan Cannon whose husband (Laurence
Luckinbill) is a best selling children's author. He goes in for a minor medical procedure (having a mole removed), and
through a series of catastrophes, ends up in a coma and on life support. That
may sound like a drama, but
Such Good Friends is really a very (as in
very) black comedy, and if you're properly jaded, it is quite
funny a lot of the time. Cannon's main liaison at the hospital is a kind of manic doctor played by James Coco, and he
repeatedly brings in all sorts of specialists to consult who put the screws to the Cannon character in terms of signing
releases and other bureaucratic nonsense while never being able to treat the problem at hand. There are a couple of
viciously humorous scenes, including one fantastic one at the hospital commissary where one of the specialists
"assures" Cannon that now that her husband is near death (due to so many foul ups at the hospital), he'll
finally receive decent care. It's a stunning and rather prescient indictment of the American medical system, one
that in its own way is reminiscent of Paddy Chayefsky's vastly underrated
The Hospital.
Simultaneously unfolding with the medical drama is the fact that Cannon becomes aware that her husband had been
having an affair with one of her best friends (played by the incredibly lovely Jennifer O'Neill). That of course puts the
once devoted wife into an emotional tailspin, which she attempts to get out of by attempting to bed O'Neill's lover (a
rather hirsute Ken Howard) and, later, the doctor played by Coco. She ultimately discovers that her husband was in
fact a serial cheater and had a not very cleverly coded "little black book" that detailed his conquests, romantic
assignations that include just about every bit player seen earlier in the film.
Such Good Friends probably would have been a much better film had it completely jettisoned its supposedly
dramatic (some would say melodramatic) content and played everything resolutely for laughs (albeit squirm worthy
laughs). The film is tonally at odds with itself, not really having the requisite daring it needs to completely exploit this
blacker and black humor. As with the two previous films in this collection, this film has a rather unusual composer, at
least for you Broadway fans who like to read credits. If any of you have original cast recordings from the past several
decades (including several high profile pieces by Stephen Sondheim), you may recognize the name of Thomas Z.
Shepard, one of the two or three leading Broadway musical recording producers of the past half century or more. This
was Shepard's only feature film work as a composer (he did one television piece as well).
Really astute lovers
of Broadway trivia will also recognize the film's production designer, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, who contributed to many
Broadway plays and musicals, including a couple of legendary flops like
I'm Solomon.
