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326 Otto Preminger Otto Preminger (born 1906) directed five films before Laura (1944)—one Austrian, four American—but since he disowns them, I haven’t seen them, and no commentator to my knowledge has ever spoken well of them, we might as well begin with the (false) assumption that a tabula rasa preceded his early masterpiece. False assumptions—and clean slates that tend to function like mirrors—are usually central to our experience of Preminger’s work. His narrative lines are strewn with deceptive counterpaths, shifting viewpoints, and ambiguous characters who perpetually slip out of static categories and moral definitions, so that one can be backed out of a conventionally placid Hollywood mansion driveway by somebody and something called Angel Face (1952) (and embodied by Jean Simmons ) only to be hurtled without warning over the edge of a cliff. As for tabulae rasae, there is Angel Face herself and her numerous weird sisters—among them Maggie McNamara in The Moon Is Blue (1953), Jean Seberg in Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Eva Marie Saint in Exodus (1960), and, closer to the cradle, the almost invisible Bunny Lake in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and Alexandra Hay in Skidoo (1968). There is even Jean Seberg in Breathless, whose part, Godard informs us, ‘‘was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse. I could have taken the last shot of Preminger’s film and started after dissolving to a title, ‘Three Years Later.’ ’’ Or, to return to our starting point, there is Gene Tierney in Whirlpool (1949) and Laura. Laura even begins with a false impression. After the credits the screen grows dark, and the voice of Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) tells us, ‘‘I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.’’ We go on to discover that a body whose face has been destroyed by a shotgun blast is discovered outside Laura’s flat. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), a detective, sets out to learn who she was; haunted by her portrait and one of her favorite records, smelling her perfume and fingering her clothes, he fills the tabula rasa of her absence with a dream (we are implicitly invited to do the same) and then falls in love with the dream. At which point the real Laura, not dead at all, walks into the room. At least four Lauras are created during the course of the film: one by Lydecker (he refers to her as his ‘‘creation’’); one by McPherson; a third by the audience , who follow Lydecker’s narration and McPherson’s investigation; and then a FILMMAKERS 327 fourth by Gene Tierney as the lady herself, who enters the film to reconcile and confound all the other versions. But dreams have been generated by this time, and for the remainder of the film we see them being tested by and contrasted with their original stimulus, with gliding camera movements serving to reassemble and rearrange all the characters in relation to this central axis, a series of permutations that place everyone ‘‘on trial,’’ in a kind of moral limbo. Even our own qualifications as impartial witnesses are thrown into doubt by the shifting perspectives . Like the characters, we are prone to look at faces and invest portions of ourselves in them, to the extent that each important character becomes a different kind of mirror. To some extent, all Preminger’s films are inquiries, and if that is what makes them interesting, it is also what makes them problematic. (Some questions are more interesting than others.) A filmmaker like Rossellini, Rouch, or Preminger who chooses to pose questions rather than answer them is likely to encounter misunderstandings, particularly when these questions are placed within a fictional mode (Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, Rouch’s Gare du Nord, Preminger’s Whirlpool), and even more so when, in Preminger’s case, the plots pretend to resolve the questions that the style raises. Thus, in The Thirteenth Letter (1951), for example, a remake of Clouzot’s Le corbeau, the search for the author of poisonpen letters in a small Canadian community so relentlessly places every character under suspicion that the dénouement proves to be anticlimactic and wholly inadequate for releasing the anxiety that has been established. As the least apparently autobiographical of all ‘‘personal’’ Hollywood stylists, Preminger frequently mystifies the spectator who is looking for a fixed moral reference. When his camera starts to move, one feels that his characters are being not so much shown as observed, juxtaposed, interrogated...

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