Egoless is a pretty rare accolade in Hollywood, and probably a useful one for a fondly remembered president of the DGA. But it’s not the whole story, as Keenan makes clear. In stylistic terms, Wise was indelibly marked by the lessons he learned during his apprenticeship in the hothouse of inventiveness and low-budget creativity that was RKO in the 1940s. Working first under Orson Welles as editor on Citizen Kane, and then within the fabled and democratically organized Val Lewton production unit as a tyro director of low budget, atmospheric chillers like Curse of the Cat People, Wise, as his later work testifies, absorbed the lessons imparted by such stellar mentors. His black and white films through the late ’50s are consistently informed by the expressionist chiaroscuro compositions of Kane DP Gregg Toland, and enriched by Wise’s own taste for documentary realism and his early gift for visual effects. Also evident are Welles’ noirish visual touches, including information rich, long single takes that Wise would so often favor. Add to this the ingrained budget-conscious habits of the Lewton group and you have, Keenan argues, a rich foundation for a great career. And indeed, all these hallmarks of his approach are evident to varying degrees in movies as different from one another as West Side Story, The Day the Earth Stood Still and I Want to Live!

Keenan’s survey of Wise’s career contains clear and persuasive analyses of individual sequences and techniques. It reveals an artist determined to let his material live and breathe, and to value the story’s integrity above all else—no matter the genre, the budget, the style or the stars. Keenan also notes that in films where Wise did insert his own personal concerns—in the Vietnam-influenced The Sand Pebbles and the anti-racist Odds Against Tomorrow—the results were often less successful. But when all the evidence is in, he concludes that Wise’s consistency, sobriety, technical perfectionism and a hands-off approach add up to a recognizable and admirable aesthetic all its own.

Otto Preminger:
The Man Who
Would Be King
(Knopf, 592 pages, $35)
By Foster Hirsch

Moving beyond the one-dimensional stereotype, Foster Hirsch examines Preminger’s many flaws and contradictions in the first full-length biography of the director. Here was a man who had fled Austria with his socially prominent Jewish family, yet who was famed for playing Nazis; a man who directed Exodus, a film about the founding of a free Jewish state, who nonetheless often behaved like a dictator on the set. But this image of Otto the Terrible misses the many accomplishments of this pioneering producer/director, who, among other achievements, lit the long fuse that would later detonate the Production Code.

Preminger was a privileged young man in Vienna, the son of the country’s most successful Jewish jurist, and a law school grad himself before succumbing to the lure of theater. Later, theater and the law would define his career as he adapted numerous Broadway plays for the screen, often with a lawyer’s sense of how ambiguous the facts can appear. As Hirsch explains, Preminger’s signature style often involved standing back from the action onscreen by using long shots and hands-off editing to allow the audience to come to its own conclusions. We also get to see Otto the egomaniac, Otto the racially colorblind mentor to Dorothy Dandridge, and Otto the PR-savvy producer/director/showman. Hirsch, the author of numerous books including studies of Woody Allen, film noir, and the Actors Studio, mines archives and memoirs to persuasively make a case for the greatness of at least 10 of Preminger’s films, while noting also the terrible falling off that occurred after 1965 with projects as woefully misguided as Skidoo and Rosebud.

If ever a director warranted the “warts-and-all” biographical approach, it is Preminger. But Hirsh, like his subject, remains judiciously balanced throughout, providing at long last the three-dimensional, in-depth portrait this important filmmaker deserves. And for good measure, there is an epic, spittle-strewing tantrum every 20 pages.

lthough he never directed a millimeter of film footage himself, the man at the heart of this book left a deep and indelible mark on every movie that Hollywood made between 1934 and 1954. In those years, Joseph Breen’s work essentially functioning as chief censor and morals cop as the head of the studios’ Production Code Administration (also known as the Hays Code). He was responsible for establishing hard and fast laws for what could and could not be depicted on screen. This ranged from dead bodies to double beds, and to ensuring, blue pencil in hand, that scripts didn’t violate these laws (a process known as “Breening”). He was also the point man between the Catholic Church, the most active and powerfully censorious religious entity of the era, and the insecure, still partially unassimilated Jewish moguls who ran the studios. That insecurity was evident by their turning over moral invigilation to the servant of an occasionally anti-Semitic religious denomination.

Doherty gives us the greatest hits of the Breen years—excising rude words in Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue, covering Jane Russell’s unconstrained breasts in The Outlaw, and so on. He offers a rounded portrait of his glad-handing Irish-American protagonist, but the book is greatly enhanced by the detailed historical perspective Doherty brings to his examination of relations between American Judaism and Catholicism at a time when World War II was brewing and the election of a Catholic president was still some years off. As he points out, this helps explain both the noticeable dearth of movies about Jewish issues in that period, and the simultaneous surfeit of Catholic-themed films such as Going My Way, Boys Town, Angels with Dirty Faces, and the oddly devout oeuvre of Loretta “Attila the Nun” Young. Built on a solid foundation of archival research, Doherty nonetheless delivers his portrait in a sprightly, reader-friendly style, making Breen and his complex, vanished times come alive with contemporary resonance.