Fallen Angel (USA, 1945)
Directed by Otto Preminger Screenplay Harry Kleiner Adaptation Novel Title AuthorCinematography (b/w) Joseph La Shelle Editor Harry Reynolds Art Direction Lyle Wheeler, Leland Fuller Sound Harry M. Leonard Music David Raksin With Alice Faye June Mills Dana Andrews Eric Stanton Linda Darnell Stella Charles Bickford Judd Anne Revere Clara Mills Bruce Cabot Atkins John Carradine Professor Madley Percy Kilbride Pop Olin Howlin Ellis Produced by Otto Preminger Production Company 20th Century-Fox Runtime 98 minutes. DVD: UK 2004. Distributed by BFI (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1,33:1 Sound Mix Mono Extras Theatrical trailer. Biographies of Otto Preminger and Marty Holland.

Whirlpool (USA, 1950)
Directed by Otto Preminger Screenplay Ben Hecht, based on the novel Methinks the Lady by Guy Endore Cinematography (b/w) Arthur Miller Editor Louis Loeffler Art Direction Lyle Wheeler, Leland Fuller Sound Harry M. Leonard Music David Raksin With Gene Tierney Ann Sutton Richard Conte Dr. Bill Sutton José Ferrer David Korvo Charles Bickford Lieutenant Colton Barbara O'Neil Theresa Randolph Eduard Franz Martin Avery Constance Collier Tina Cosgrove Fortunio Bonanova Baron Ian MacDonald Store Detective Bruce Hamilton Sergeant Jeffreys Alex Gerry Dr. Peter Duval Larry Keating Mr. Simms Larry Dobkin Dr. Wayne Nancy Valentine Taffy Lou Produced by Otto Preminger Production Company 20th Century-Fox Runtime 97 minutes. DVD: UK 2004. Distribution by BFI (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1,33:1 Sound Mix Mono Extras Biographies of Otto Preminger and Ben Hecht.

Where the Sidewalk Ends (USA, 1950)
Directed by Otto Preminger Screenplay Ben Hecht, based on the novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart Adaption by Victor Trivas and Frank P. Rosenberg Cinematography (b/w) Joseph La Shelle Editor Louis Loeffler Art Direction Lyle Wheeler, J. Russell Spencer Sound Harry M. Leonard Music Cyril Mockridge With Dana Andrews Mark Dixon Gene Tierney Morgan Taylor Gary Merrill Scalise Bert Freed Klein Tom Tully Jiggs Taylor Karl Malden Lt. Thomas Ruth Donnelly Martha Craig Stevens Ken Paine Robert Simon Inspector Nicholas Foley Harry von Zell Dick Morrison Don Appell Willie Bender Neville Brand Steve Grace Mills Mrs. Tribaum Oleg Cassini Oleg Mayer Produced by Otto Preminger Production Company 20th Century-Fox Runtime 95 minutes. DVD: UK 2004. Distribution by BFI (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1,33:1 Sound Mix Mono Extras Theatrical trailer. Biographies of Otto Preminger and Ben Hecht.

Carmen Jones (USA, 1954)
Directed by Otto Preminger Screenplay Harry Kleiner Book and Lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée Cinematography (CinemaScope, Deluxe Color) Sam Leavitt Editor Louis Loeffler Art Direction Edward L. Ilou Music Georges Bizet Musical Direction Herschel Burke Gilbert Titles Saul Bass Choreographer Herbert Ross With Dorothy Dandridge Carmen Jones Harry Belafonte Joe Olga James Cindy Lou Pearl Bailey Frankie Joe Adams Husky Miller Brock Peters Sergeant Brown Diahann Carroll Myrt Nick Stewart Dink Roy Glenn Rum Max Roach Max DeForest Covan Trainer Marilyn Horne Singing voice of Carmen LeVern Hutchinson Singing voice of Joe Marvin Hayes Singing voice of Husky Produced by Otto Preminger Production Company Carlyle Productions/20th Century-Fox Runtime 107 minutes (101 min. PAL). DVD: UK 2004. Distribution by BFI (region 2) Aspect Ratio 2,55:1 Sound Mix Stereo Extras Theatrical trailer. Biographies of Otto Preminger, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and Saul Bass.

When, years after he made them, Otto Preminger was asked about Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), three of the four Preminger films that the British Film Institute has just released on DVD, he had, in substance, but one thing to say. On Fallen Angel: “I don’t remember the picture at all.” Whirlpool: “I cannot remember anything about this film.” Where the Sidewalk Ends: “I remember nothing about it.”

These three films constitute, along with Laura, The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952), what has been considered Preminger’s contribution to “film noir.” It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as “films noirs” is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954), the subject of the fourth BFI DVD, as a musical; or In Harm’s Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger’s films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms.

In theme and style, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends—no less than Laura, their template in some respects—depart radically from the “film noir” pattern supposed to be exemplified by such films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1946), Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). This pattern is characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings. In the four Preminger films, the only figure who remotely resembles a femme fatale, the waitress Stella (Linda Darnell) in Fallen Angel, is viewed realistically and sympathetically as someone who likes the attention of men but puts them on notice that her main goal is to land a husband; her femininity proves fatal only to herself, when one of her admirers turns homicidal. The four Preminger films share, moreover, the theme of a character’s struggle to free herself or himself from destructive behaviors and entanglements, and they all have endings in which the struggle appears to be resolved positively. (Even Angel Face, the sole Preminger film to conform, ostensibly, to the pattern I have outlined, remains demonstrably a work to which “noir” is irrelevant.) Preminger’s revising the end of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (in the 1955 film of the novel) so that the protagonist walks away free of his drug addiction and cleared of suspicion of murder is a vivid example of the director’s optimism.

Preminger’s handling of the therapeutic theme is, to be sure, frequently ambiguous, not least in Laura, in which he avoids presenting the rejection by Laura (Gene Tierney) of two inappropriate suitors in favor of the film’s policeman-hero, Mark (Dana Andrews), as a clear-cut bid for self-determination. Waldo (Clifton Webb) accuses Laura of being drawn to Mark because of his physique, and Waldo’s implication that she is still following an established self-destructive behavior pattern is allowed to stand unrefuted. Moreover, Mark’s obsession with the Laura he thought dead bodes ill for the future of his relationship with the living Laura: he has fallen in love with a portrait, not a woman (as Rita Hayworth put it, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me”).

In Fallen Angel, on the other hand, if the triumph of the down-and-out hero, Eric (Dana Andrews), over his past appears conclusive, this is largely because of the force of the mise-en-scene and acting in the hotel-room scene in which he concedes bitterly that his life of hustling and scheming has left him “with exactly nothing.” This recognition, and the redemptive presence of June (Alice Faye), to whom he articulates it, prepare us for the plot resolution in which Eric takes charge of his destiny by gathering (offscreen) the evidence that clears himself of Stella’s murder and points to the retired policeman Judd (Charles Bickford) as the killer. The verisimilitude of this resolution may be questioned, but its emotional movement is convincing. Whirlpool, in which a psychiatrist’s kleptomaniac wife (Gene Tierney) falls prey to an unscrupulous hypnotist (José Ferrer), and Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which a policeman (Dana Andrews) tries to cover up his accidental killing of a suspect (Craig Stevens), each end by suggesting that although the protagonist is on her or his way to rehabilitation, a full cure will be delayed, in the first case by some period of psychiatric therapy, in the second by a probable prison sentence.

From internal and external evidence, it’s clear that the makers of Fallen Angel and Whirlpool made a conscious attempt to reproduce certain aspects of Laura. Signs of this effort are to be found in the records relating to the production histories of the films. On an early draft of the script of Fallen Angel, 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck penciled the notation: “Everything great up to last act­—needs hypo like Laura.” In script conferences for Whirlpool, Zanuck repeatedly urged Preminger and screenwriter Ben Hecht to draw on Laura for inspiration, noting that the villainous Korvo should be “just as interesting as Clifton Webb was in Laura,” remarking that Whirlpool “can have much of the quality and strangeness of Laura,” and proposing changes to the ending (that were adopted in part) that would put the heroine in jeopardy, after the manner of the last sequence of Laura.

Fallen Angel brings back, along with the male star of Laura, its cinematographer, Joseph La Shelle (who would also shoot Where the Sidewalk Ends); the trailer for the film, included as an extra on the BFI’s DVD, even contains the blurb: “The creator of Laura does it again!” Fallen Angel and Whirlpool are both scored, as was Laura, by David Raksin, and Fallen Angel associates its theme song, Raksin’s “Slowly,” with a female character (Stella), just as Laura had been identified with the famous theme of Laura. At one moment in Fallen Angel, Raksin again uses the musical special effect, a kind of tape manipulation that he called the “Len-o-tone,” which had contributed so memorably to the central scene in Laura of Mark falling asleep in the armchair in Laura’s apartment.

Certain visual and performance devices in Fallen Angel and Whirlpool also echo Laura. In Fallen Angel, Eric’s slight smile of triumph after he succeeds in making a date with June recalls the smiles flashed briefly by the same actor in the part of Mark in Laura, when his chances of success with Laura seem good. In Whirlpool, the portrait of the murdered Theresa (Barbara O’Neil) on the wall of her own living room recalls the portrait of Laura in her apartment: it occupies the heroine’s attention in a shot composed in a manner reminiscent of the shots of Mark standing under Laura’s portrait. The ending of Whirlpool, with Korvo’s wild shot accidentally smashing a record player, repeats the accidental shooting of the clock at the end of Laura.

Laura, Fallen Angel, and Whirlpool all tell the same story: an older man is obsessed with a younger woman and is driven to murder when he is frustrated in his attempts to possess her. This story achieves its simplest form in Fallen Angel: Judd is obsessed with Stella and kills her. The other two films play variations on this theme. In Laura, Waldo kills Diane Redfern, mistaking her for Laura; he tries again to kill Laura but is himself killed. Whirlpool has a rather distant relationship to the basic pattern, in that Korvo’s desire for Ann (Tierney) does not appear to be an important motive: he kills Theresa in order to prevent her from exposing him as a swindler, and hypnotizes Ann into concealing incriminating evidence and casting suspicion on herself. But the original pattern still plays out, forming something like the unconscious of the film. Korvo’s bitterness over being rejected by Ann (even under hypnosis, she refuses to hold his hand) is strongly emphasized, suggesting a motivation perhaps hidden even to him.

Though it reteams Tierney and Andrews, Where the Sidewalk Ends is less closely linked to Laura than either Fallen Angel or Whirlpool. Crucially, it fails to conform to the older man-younger woman pattern. Sidewalk is still a film on obsession, but the object of the obsession is no longer a woman: the policeman hero (named, once again, Mark) is obsessed with the criminality of his dead father, and in striving to distance himself from it, or perhaps to take a posthumous revenge on his father, he goes too far, using violence to track down and punish crooks. In this film, Tierney’s character is no longer, as in Laura, a glamorous and inaccessible object of desire but a redemptive, angelic figure (like Alice Faye’s June in Fallen Angel) who is also a proletarian (unlike both June and Laura).

Where the Sidewalk Ends has points in common both with Whirlpool and with Fallen Angel. Like Whirlpool, the film portrays the criminality of its central character as a compulsion whose origins lie in the character’s relationship with his or her father. And both Mark in Sidewalk and Judd in Fallen Angel, as Gérard Legrand observed, are policemen who conduct investigations of crimes they’ve committed. Fallen Angel and Sidewalk both depict police brutality; and although the main police investigator (Charles Bickford) in Whirlpool plays, ultimately, a benign role, the police are shown for much of the film as threatening, persecutory figures (a representational strategy that links the film to Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan), blinded by appearances and by their own need for a victim.

Preminger’s predilection for staging action in sustained takes with complicated blocking and camera movement provides the major element of stylistic continuity among the films on the BFI DVDs. Fallen Angel features some especially striking and fluid camera movement, such as a lengthy traveling shot (done on location) of June and Eric walking alongside a church, down a street, across an intersection (Eric briefly pausing in mid-conversation to pull June back by the arm as two bicycle riders go by), and in front of her house. Sometimes the camera, on a crane, alternately drives forward into and pulls back from a scene. One of the most startling instances of this type of movement occurs in a dance-hall scene, when, in the pause between songs, the camera moves in to frame Eric and Stella in a close two-shot, separating them from their partners (June and Atkins [Bruce Cabot], respectively); then, as the band starts the next number, the camera tracks out again, and the original couples resume dancing. Throughout Fallen Angel, the movement of the camera creates patterns of tension and release, linked to the characters’ moods, their perceptions, and their knowledge or ignorance of their environment. The result is a fluid state of audience involvement, in which we are led to identify with or detach ourselves from Eric’s point of view and thus to constitute him as both participant and percipient.

The role of camera movement in Whirlpool is more restricted than in Fallen Angel. The film’s climax—Ann’s assertion that her husband, Bill (Richard Conte) is to blame for her psychological condition—is highlighted not by camera movement but by performance, editing, and a staging of the scene that requires Ann to swivel around in her chair to confront Bill. Where the Sidewalk Ends shows a greater reliance on closeups than is typical of Preminger, indicating his determination to strip this drama to its essentials and to emphasize Mark’s relationships with his savior (Tierney) and his gangster adversary (Gary Merrill).

Long takes and elaborate camera movement would be the hallmarks of Preminger’s work as an independent director-producer, of which Carmen Jones, his version of Oscar Hammerstein’s all-black-cast adaptation of Bizet’s opera, is a superb example. Though financed and distributed by 20th Century-Fox, Carmen Jones was inaugurated by Preminger’s own company and was considered an outside project, not covered under Preminger’s producer-director contract with Fox (which would last until 1957, although Preminger made no further films under the contract after finishing his work on River of No Return in 1953).

Carmen Jones was Preminger’s second film in CinemaScope, and, as in the first, River of No Return, his response to the increased width of the screen is to expand the characters’ fields of action and motion, emphasizing the vastness of both their physical environment and their sphere of moral decision. The dislike of confinement expressed by Dorothy Dandridge’s Carmen cries out for the wide screen, and Preminger obliges her with a generous and elastic mise-en-scene, staging scenes as unfurling ribbons of movement, gesture, and reaction. As in the earlier black-and-white films, the long takes and camera movements are also a source of tension, and it’s clear throughout Carmen Jones that Preminger likes the pressure the long take puts on actors, as when he saves a difficult fight (between Harry Belafonte and Brock Peters) for the end of a lengthy and complicated dialogue take.

In Carmen Jones, Preminger returns again to the story of a man’s lethal obsession with a woman. Carmen’s superstitiousness and her apparent belief in an inescapable destiny combine with a situation of entrapment (her lover, Joe [Belafonte], must hide from the military police after going AWOL) to produce an atmosphere of fatalism that appears alien to Preminger; indeed, the whole point of Preminger’s visual strategies in Carmen Jones could be to resist this fatalism. The film invites us to regard the characters with admiration and pity; it rarely seems to be with any of the characters, in the way Laura, Fallen Angel, and Where the Sidewalk Ends are frequently with the Dana Andrews characters, or the way Whirlpool is with Ann. Preminger discourages us from becoming too closely involved with the subjective positions of Carmen or Joe. One of the few Preminger films that can be called tragedies, Carmen Jones encompasses the tragic visions of its protagonists within a total vision that is sympathetic but basically ironic: in this, the film resembles such Preminger works as Forever Amber, Angel Face, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Advise and Consent (1962), and In Harm’s Way.

The BFI’s presentation of its four Preminger films is superlative. The prints of the three black-and-white films are crisp, although Where the Sidewalk Ends shows rather more wear than the other two, and the DVD transfers manage to convey the range of tonalities in the lighting schemes of La Shelle (Fallen Angel, Sidewalk) and Arthur Miller (Whirlpool). The print of Carmen Jones is immaculate, with rich color, and the film is letterboxed in its early-CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1. The only extras on the DVDs, apart from text-and-still-photo biographies of Preminger and a few of his collaborators, are trailers for three of the films (all but Whirlpool). The trailer for Where the Sidewalk Ends is of special, though no doubt esoteric, interest in that it features alternate takes to those used in the film.

Chris Fujiwara, critic and journalist, and the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press), is currently working on a critical biography of Otto Preminger, to be published by Faber & Faber.