The Austrian-born film director Otto Preminger had a long career in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1970s where he directed movies that pushed boundaries and defied conventions of the time. Known for his controlling style and legendary temper, Preminger directed over 35 films in various genres including the classics Laura and Anatomy of a Murder. Throughout his career, Preminger challenged censorship rules by tackling controversial topics and his films helped liberalize the Hollywood production code. While views of his legacy differed, Preminger made entertaining films that brought a mature approach to the industry.

1. The bombastic Austrian-born film director and producer Otto
Preminger (1906-1986) had a long Hollywood career making
movies that defied conventions of the time.
Nicknamed "Otto the Terrible" for his legendary tantrums on
Hollywood sets, Otto Preminger cajoled countless stars in
dozens of films from the 1930s through the 1970s. His movies
ranged from the delicately crafted suspense classic Laura, to the
colossal epic Exodus, and included many commercial and
critical successes as well as failures. Preminger had no single
specialty, but his films ranged over a wide variety of styles and
subject matters. His trademarks were his staunch independence
and fierce control over all aspects of his films.
Early Years
Preminger's father, Marc, was a lawyer and onetime attorney
general of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Otto and his brother
Ingo both earned law degrees in Vienna, the latter of whom
ended up as a Hollywood agent. Otto was a teenager when he
first started acting in plays in Vienna. At 17, he starred as
Lysander in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and
at 19, he was already managing a Vienna theater. By 20, he was
mostly bald and had earned his law degree. He spent his
twenties becoming one of Europe's most successful theatrical
producer-directors and at 26, he directed his first film, Die
Grosse Liebe.
Preminger was Jewish, and in 1935, he thought it wise to leave
Austria to escape the Nazi threat and take up an invitation to
direct Broadway plays in the United States. In New York, he
directed Libel, a minor success and the next year, went to
Hollywood to make the films Under Your Spell and Danger,
Love at Work for Daryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century Fox.
After clashes with Zanuck, Preminger returned to New York and
directed the plays Outward Bound, which had a 19-month
Broadway run, and Margin for Error, in which Preminger also
acted--playing a Nazi official. By 1941, Zanuck was in the

2. Army and Preminger was invited back to Hollywood and
remained under contract with Fox as a director, producer, and
actor until 1952. In 1942, Preminger played Nazi heavies in The
Pied Piper and They Got Me Covered, and the next year, he
directed and acted in a film version of Margin for Error. In
1944, he directed the comedy In the Meantime, Darling.
Hollywood Studio Days
Relations between Zanuck and Preminger remained cool until
1944, when Preminger persuaded the studio heads to let him
produce and direct the suspense story Laura. Starring Clifton
Webb, Dana Andrews, and Gene Tierney, Laura was a critical
and commercial success. Many considered it Preminger's finest
film. Halliwell's Film Guide called Laura "a quiet, streamlined
little murder mystery that brought a new adult approach to the
genre and heralded the mature film noir of the later forties."
Preminger received an Academy Award nomination for Laura.
During the rest of his tenure with Fox, Preminger churned out a
number of films, few of them notable. Tallulah Bankhead
starred in his 1945 costume drama A Royal Scandal. It was
followed by Where Do We Get from Here in 1945, Centennial
Summer, and Fallen Angel in 1946, Forever Amber and Daisy
Kenyon in 1947, That Lady in Ermine in 1948, The Fan in 1949,
Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1950, The
Thirteenth Letter in 1951, and Angel Face in 1952.
Taking on the Censors
In 1953, Preminger, who had grown to resent Hollywood, quit
20th Century Fox and formed his own company, Carlyle
Productions. For the rest of the decade, Preminger produced and
directed several taboo-breaking films.
Preminger had directed a highly successful stage production of
Hugh Herbert's light sex comedy The Moon Is Blue, and he
made it into his first independent movie in 1953. Starring
William Holden and David Niven, the film was notable only for
defying the strict Hollywood production code. Preminger
insisted on the play's original dialogue being used in the film,
including words such as "virgin," "pregnant," and "seduce,"

3. terms that were taboo in films of that era. The Moon Is Blue
was the first commercial feature to be released without a seal of
approval from the Motion Pictures Association of America, and
it earned a "condemned" rating from the powerful Roman
Catholic Legion of Decency. It also was banned by local
censorship boards until Preminger won a U.S. Supreme Court
case ordering the film to be shown.
In 1954, Preminger directed two movies: River of No Return, a
successful Western with Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum
that was one of the first features shot in wide-screen
Cinemascope, and Carmen Jones, a musical adaptation of Bizet's
opera Carmen, with an all-black cast, including Dorothy
Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and Pearl Bailey. In 1955, he
brought to the screen The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, a
military justice drama with an all-star cast including Gary
Cooper, Rod Steiger, and Ralph Bellamy.
In 1956, Preminger directed Frank Sinatra as a junkie in The
Man With the Golden Arm. It was Hollywood's first serious
look at drug addiction and included sensational scenes of
Sinatra's character going "cold turkey" to kick his habit. The
film was banned in Boston among other cities, but again
Preminger went to the courts and beat the censors. Though it
caused a sensation, critics didn't think much of the way
Preminger had lightened up his subject and tacked on a happy
ending. Diana Willing in Films in Review called it "a very
inferior film.... The script is inexcusably clumsy, the sets are
unbelievable, and the casting is ridiculous." Nonetheless,
Preminger's challenge to the studios' rating system proved a
success. In the late 1950s, the code was liberalized, and
Preminger's films paved the way for directors to tackle formerly
taboo subjects frankly and openly.
He followed The Man With the Golden Arm in 1957 with
Bonjour Tristesse, based on a novel by Francoise Sagan, was
about a teenage girl who becomes enmeshed in his father's
womanizing and ends up causing a death. David Niven, Deborah
Kerr, and Jean Seberg starred in the film. Seberg also appeared

4. that same year in Preminger's film of George Bernard Shaw's
play about Joan of Arc, Saint Joan. Shot in Great Britain and
adapted for the screen by Graham Greene, the film was a flop,
and Seberg's performance was universally panned.
Master of the Set
By the late 1950s, Preminger had developed a reputation as a
tyrant. He kept firm control over all aspects of his film
company, including scripts, casting, advertising, and even
camera equipment. In 1959, Preminger brought another all-
black musical, Porgy and Bess, to the screen, starring Sidney
Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., and Diahann Carroll. Samuel
Goldwyn's Columbia Pictures produced the film. On the set,
Preminger and Goldwyn argued about every detail.
Also in 1959, he produced and directed the box-office smash
Anatomy of a Murder, a riveting courtroom drama starring
James Stewart. Preminger got the film publicity during its
filming by firing its star, Lana Turner, and replacing her with
Lee Remick; by casting in the role of the judge a non-actor,
Joseph N. Welch, who was famous as the Army's chief counsel
during the televised anti-communism hearings of Senator Joseph
McCarthy; and by bringing jazz great Duke Ellington onto the
set to liven up the score. Donald Chase noted in Film Comment
that Anatomy of a Murder had "a buzzing low-key energy that
never falters over 2 hours and 40 minutes." The film also
provoked controversy for its realistic rape scene, and was
nominated for an Academy Award for best picture of 1959.
In 1960, Preminger unleashed his epic Exodus, based on Leon
Uris's best-selling novel about the founding of the state of
Israel. Preminger again displayed his knack for publicity. To
cast a mob scene, he sold lottery tickets to 30,000 people and
delayed the prize drawing until morning, to keep the extras
around all night. The prizes turned out to be tickets to the
opening of Exodus. He also made headlines by using as his
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted by
Hollywood since the McCarthy hearings. With a cast of
thousands, including Paul Newman, Exodus was a big-budget,

5. 220-minute extravaganza that failed to impress audiences or
critics.
In 1961 Preminger directed the successful Advise and Consent,
a political thriller adapted from a best-seller by Allen Drury.
Entertainment Weekly critic Tim Purtell termed it "a hornet's
nest of a drama about United States senators squabbling over a
controversial cabinet nominee.... one of the savviest of all films
about politics."
Hits and Misses
Preminger's pace had begun to slow. In 1963, he brought out
The Cardinal, a long-winded but visually arresting film about a
young priest's rise to power in the Catholic Church. Andrew
Sarris, author of Confessions of a Cultist, noted that "Preminger
is much better with image than with actors." Two years later,
Preminger directed In Harm's Way. In A World on Film, critic
Stanley Kauffmann called it "one more guts-and-glory naval
saga complete with John Wayne as a crusty commander and an
ensign son who finally does him proud." Kauffmann added that
Preminger "has a reputation--deserved--for intelligence and
cultivation, and another reputation--equally deserved --for
shrewd exploitation of mass tastes."
Preminger clearly was fading in the late 1960s. In 1967, he
directed Hurry Sundown, a melodramatic story about race
relations with Jane Fonda and Michael Caine. In 1968, he made
Skidoo, considered a feeble attempt to appeal to the counter-
culture of the era. In 1970, Preminger followed with what was
regarded as another flop, Tell Me That You Love Me, Julie
Moon. Starring Liza Minnelli, it was the story of a disfigured
girl, a gay paraplegic, and an introverted epileptic who live
together. Writer Elaine May penned Such Good Friends, which
Preminger released in 1972, a "satiric parable which alternates
between sex comedy and medical expose," according to
Halliwell's. Preminger's next film, the 1975 release Rosebud,
about Middle Eastern terrorists, was ignored by the public, as
was his final film, The Human Factor, released in 1979.
In his personal life, in 1971 after the death of stripper Gypsy

6. Rose Lee, Preminger revealed he was the father of her son, Erik
Kirkland, who became his chief assistant. In 1986, at the age of
80, Preminger died of cancer at his home in Manhattan. Critics
sharply disagreed on his legacy. Sarris noted: "His enemies
have never forgiven him for being a director with the
personality of a producer." And Purtell contended: "Of all big-
name Hollywood directors, possibly none has had as bad a rep
as Otto Preminger. Admired in the '50s by French critics and
new-wave filmmakers, he was largely dismissed in this country
for what were perceived to be superficial, self-important
films.... He deserves better.... Preminger made intelligent,
literate entertainments that were models of screen clarity."