Otto Preminger

The Man Who Would Be King

Készleten

Példány állapota: jó
Kiadó: Alfred A. Knopf
Kiadás éve: 2007
Nyelv: angol
Oldalak száma: 572

The first full-scale life of the controversial, greatly admired yet often underrated director/producer who was known as “Otto the Terrible.”

Nothing about Otto Preminger was small, trivial, or self-denying, from his privileged upbringing in Vienna as the son of an improbably successful Jewish lawyer to his work in film and theater in Europe and, later, in America.

His range as a director was remarkable: romantic comedies (The Moon Is Blue); musicals (Carmen Jones; Porgy and Bess); courtroom dramas (The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell; Anatomy of a Murder); adaptations of classic plays (Shaw’s Saint Joan, screenplay by Graham Greene); political melodrama (Advise and Consent); war films (In Harm’s Way); film noir (Laura; Angel Face; Bunny Lake Is Missing). He directed sweeping sagas (from The Cardinal and Exodus to Hurry Sundown) and small-scale pictures, adapting Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse with Arthur Laurents and Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm.

Foster Hirsch shows us Preminger battling studio head Darryl F. Zanuck; defying and undermining the Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Catholic Legion of Decency, first in 1953 by refusing to remove the words “virgin” and “pregnant” from the dialogue of The Moon Is Blue (he released the film without a Production Code Seal of Approval) and then, two yeras later, when he dared to make The Man with the Golden Arm, about the then-taboo subject of drug addiction. When he made Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, the censors objected to the use of the words “rape,” “sperm,” “sexual climax,” and “penetration.” Preminger made one concession (substituting “violation” for “penetration”); the picture was released with the seal, and marked the beginning of the end of the Code.