Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, and John Derek in Exodus. 1960. USA. Directed by Otto Preminger
These notes accompany screenings of Otto Preminger’s </em>Exodus</a> on April 17, 18, and 19.</p>
Otto Preminger (1905–1986), like Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Edgar G. Ulmer, was a Viennese Jew. (Fritz Lang was also Viennese, though his Jewish mother had converted to Catholicism. Ulmer’s Yiddish film, Green Fields, is being shown on Wednesday of this week as part of our Weimar Touch program.) Preminger’s Judaism was mostly secular, and Exodus is the only film in which his religion or ethnicity seems of much relevance. He had actually used his accent and demeanor to be a convincing Nazi in several films, including Margin for Error and Wilder’s Stalag 17. Poster for Exodus. 1960. USA. Directed by Otto Preminger. Poster designed by Saul Bass
Much has been made of Preminger’s preference for group shots (as opposed to close-ups) to suggest an impartiality, which Gallagher attributes in part to the director’s training as a lawyer, which he claims led to a “judicial sensibility” in which “no truth…is to be taken for granted.” This becomes even more explicit in courtroom dramas like Anatomy of a Murder or depictions of the legislative process in Advise and Consent, but Exodus serves up its own entanglements in international law and politics. By hiring the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write his screenplay, Preminger was making his own comment on recent political developments and reactionary trends in America. Trumbo was working from the novel by Leon Uris, which Preminger had designated the biggest best seller since Gone with the Wind. The director had fired Uris, who was originally engaged to adapt the screenplay, because (significantly) Preminger felt the author was too partisan in his approach. Preminger said that the book by Uris “has a pox against all enemies of the Jews…. I don’t believe that there are any real villains. If somebody is a villain, I try to find out why. I don’t necessarily excuse him, but I try to understand him.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
I haven’t written much in celebration of screenwriters, most of whom deeply resent the very concept at the heart of auteurism: that the director is the primary creator of a film. I was personally present at two separate incidents where prominent screenwriters seemed to come close to directing violence at the late Andrew Sarris. The juxtaposition of the death of Ruth Prawr Jhabvala (herself a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland as a child) with a just-published story in The New Yorker reminded me that some films are worthy of respect for their literary qualities. The movies of the odd trio of director James Ivory, the late producer Ismail Merchant, and Jhabvala (which include A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day) are too often dismissed by those whose concept of the cinema is too narrow to encompass genuine works of civility and civilization.