Tag Archives: Otto Preminger

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

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A little girl, an American newly arrived in England, goes missing from the nursery school she’s just joined. The police come to investigate, but things begin to get very puzzling soon after and the superintendent in charge of the case ends up wondering: Is Bunny Lake really missing? Does Bunny Lake even exist?

This film, produced and directed by Otto Preminger, was nominated for several BAFTA awards, and having seen it, I wonder why it didn’t win even a single award. It’s a gripping story, and moves swiftly from the very start.

It begins at a home in London, where Steven Lake (Keir Dullea) goes about picking up stuff, making sure everything is draped in covers, before he locks up the house and has a word with a couple of workmen who are there to help shift some stuff to another home. Much later in the film, when Steven and his sister Ann are talking to the police, it transpires that Steven, who is a journalist, has been working in London for some time and was staying in Frogmore End (which is the house shown in the opening frames).

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Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

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A couple of months back, I was invited to an interesting series of sessions focusing on building creativity. This was part of a venture by an organization where I once worked, and the creativity-building exercises take unconventional routes to help employees think out of the box: by watching films and analyzing them, for instance. One of the sessions I attended was presented by a team which used the theme of ‘multiple narratives’ to examine four films. The classic Kurosawa film Rashomon was (of course) on the list; so was the excellent South Korean film, Memories of Murder. The other two films—which I hadn’t seen, though I’d heard of them—were Talwar and Anatomy of a Murder.

The description and brief discussion of Anatomy of a Murder that followed got me interested, and I made a mental note to get the DVD. Then, a week or so back, friend and ex-fellow blogger Harvey recommended the film to me, too, so I decided it was high time I watched it. And what a film it turned out to be.

A scene from Anatomy of a Murder

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Stalag 17 (1953)

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This post came about as a result of a chance conversation with a friend who admitted that he often confused William Holden with Joseph Cotten. That reminded me, of course, of Holden (who happens to be among my favourite actors), and then of the shameful fact that I have never, not in the nearly-four years that this blog’s been in existence, reviewed a Holden film. [Though he is, even though you can’t see his face, part of the current blog header].

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River of No Return (1954)

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This review is, of course, a tribute to Mitchum; it is also a tribute to my uncle, David Vernon Kumar. In the good old days, my uncle was a guitarist with the Hindi film company Filmistan. He was very talented, and though he passed away when I was a child, I remember him as having a great sense of humour and of regaling us with tales of his days in Bombay and the film world.
The connection: one of Vernie Uncle’s favourite tunes was the theme song of River of No Return. It’s a lovely song, and this is a lovely film.

Robert Mitchum and Tommy Rettig in River of No Return

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