Otto Preminger by Foster Hirsch
Otto Preminger had a reputation around Hollywood as a monster. The director of The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder played Nazi officers as an actor before his filmmaking career solidified and his legendary outbursts seemed compatible with those roles.
In his biography, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would be King, author Foster Hirsch finds a more complicated man behind the image. Hirsch calls him a bully capable of singling out vulnerable cast and crew for abuse. He was also a loving family man, “a loyal friend and colleague, a man with enormous charm and cultivation.” Hirsh identifies moments when Preminger’s outbursts seemed strategic—a means to his own ends. At other times, Hirsh wonders if the director was genuinely unhinged.
Preminger had an interesting life but the reason for a biography is his legacy as a filmmaker. The imperious son of prominent Viennese Jews was forced by his father to study law and many of his films included court room scenes. The best known, Anatomy of a Murder, stars Jimmy Stewart as a lawyer defending a client that he suspects is guilty. “Anatomy of a Murder defies simple notions of guilt and innocence,” Hirsch writes. Th film doesn’t leave the viewer feeling complacent about the meaning of justice.
The Preminger of Hirsh’s biography was a tough, practical man determined to claw his way up the ranks of a studio system dominated by tough, practical men. The Man Who Would be King affords many revealing glimpses into the workings of old Hollywood, whose dictates the director was willing to challenge by introducing controversial subjects (drug addiction, a murderer who goes free) unusual for his time.
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would be King is published by University Press of Kentucky.
