One of the strangest things about the elusive career of Otto Preminger (1905-1986) is that it remains elusive not because of the man’s invisibility but because of his relative omnipresence in the public eye. Though never as familiar as Alfred Hitchcock, he cut an imposing figure in the media, registering much more than either John Ford or Howard Hawks. Preminger was well known for his Nazi roles in Margin for Error (1943) and Stalag 17 (1953), for appearing in TV guest spots on Batman and Laugh-In and numerous talk shows, as a colorful player in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, and for grabbing headlines as the man who defied the Production Code of the 50s and the lingering Hollywood blacklist of the 60s while grandly mounting well-publicized movie versions of best-sellers like Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advise and Consent, and The Cardinal. Since he was one of the first of the high-profile American independents after the heyday of Griffith and Chaplin and moved from Hollywood to New York in the early 50s and never shifted his home base later, in most people’s minds he was more producer than director. Nine years after his death, however, it seems that his high visibility–like that of Hitchcock and Orson Welles–served more as mask or camouflage than as any genuine indication of what his movies were about.
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Like Erich von Stroheim, Preminger was born a Viennese Jew–but 20 years later and into a much higher economic bracket–and wound up playing the part of a Prussian sadist both on-screen and off. Stroheim, who kept his ethnic roots hidden, was more likely to vent his spleen at producers than at actors or assistants; but Preminger, who became his own producer, was the classic abusive dictator on his own sets. Anatomy of a Filmmaker–an interesting feature-length documentary about his career produced by his own family, hosted by Burgess Meredith, and recently released on video–devotes much of its space to exploring this issue. “I give ulcers, I don’t have them,” Preminger once told Peter Bogdanovich. I can vouch for the accuracy of this remark, having once spent a morning in the mid-70s watching Preminger shoot part of his penultimate feature, Rosebud, in Paris. However gracious he might have been to visiting journalists, he was hell on wheels to some of his employees.
Yet his films, for all their cynical and mordant undertones, are nearly always searching inquiries, almost never imposing foregone conclusions. Apparently the major source of his quarrels with actors was his refusal to give them motivations for their characters, an approach that often plays havoc with dramatic resolutions. But he preferred to keep alive the mystery of his characters’ personalities, to forestall any pat conclusions about them.
What remains interesting about The Moon Is Blue is less the frothy romantic-comedy material of F. Hugh Herbert’s play–which ran for 924 performances when Preminger directed it on Broadway–than the peculiar emphasis Preminger brings to it. The most warmly depicted character is neither the architect hero (William Holden) nor the perky “professional virgin” (Maggie MacNamara) he picks up, who register as sour and brittle respectively, but the hero’s next-door neighbor (David Niven)–an aging amoral playboy whose daughter is Holden’s former fiancee. But thanks to Preminger’s detached direction, all three characters emerge as interestingly unpredictable, each revealing aspects that complicate his or her generic role. Preminger clearly likes all of them, which marks him as a humanist; but his interest in the darker sides of the two romantic leads and the brighter facets of the playboy complicate his humanism with a dash of prurience.
Preminger’s liking for jazz–which bore fruit in the robust big-band scores of Elmer Bernstein for The Man With the Golden Arm and Duke Ellington for Anatomy of a Murder–led him to feature Max Roach in a clumsy cameo in Carmen Jones. This move is emblematic of his desire to fill the screen with a more diversified picture of American life than is found in most Hollywood movies, even if his impulse produces awkward or incongruous moments. It’s as if he wanted to express the democratic ideal literally, by cramming as many people as possible into his frames, and then traced a steady path through the resulting maelstrom with his questioning camera.
The film’s power has little to do with the Nelson Algren novel on which it’s based. Algren himself conceded that “it was better than most movies” and that he liked the music and Sinatra, but said he was sorry that “it was a Chicago story that had nothing to do with Chicago. Some of the people were dressed like old Vienna and some like old San Francisco. The book very specifically took place at a certain time, at a certain locale, and the movie took place nowhere.” Indeed, as Dave Kehr has aptly noted, the film’s style, including its black-and-white cinematog-raphy, is basically expressionist–filmed on sets rather than on location (a rare departure for Preminger) and peopled with grim characters who seem to have emerged from German expressionist nightmares rather than the streets of Chicago. The lighting and atmosphere are noir-ish, but the blighted human landscape is infernal–despite the relentless social determinism, which one would ordinarily associate with realism, in this tale of a beleaguered poker dealer, former junkie, and aspiring jazz drummer trying to go straight.
