Delving into Otto Preminger

When Otto Preminger called "Action!" actors invoked their patron saint. Miss a cue, overstep a mark or fluff a line, and the Mt. Etna of film directors erupted, eyes bulging, face scarlet, voice bellowing. "Otto was a terrorist -- he's Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein," recalled Leon Uris, the author of "Exodus," a best-seller that Preminger filmed.

In this, the first major biography of the director, Foster Hirsch tackles the ogre whom actors, film crews and the public loved to hate. "Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would be King" is a solidly sourced work filled with telling anecdotes and keen critical insights, and the author sees shadings, contradictions and even kindness behind Preminger's Prussian facade.

Hirsch admits that Preminger terrorized people. But, it turns out, the director could also be empathetic. Directing Liza Minnelli in "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" shortly after the death of Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland, Preminger noticed Minnelli's lips trembling during a take. "You tell me when you can begin again," he said. Hirsch depicts Preminger as both a womanizer and a family man: He lovingly nurtured three children, including a son fathered during an extramarital affair with stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

And Hirsch sees two sides to Preminger's talent for self-promotion. Some of the tasks Preminger assigned himself as producer of his own films were transparent bids for publicity. In 1956, he undertook a much-hyped tour to find an unknown to star in his film version of Shaw's "St. Joan." The discovery, Jean Seberg, a 17-year-old from Marshalltown, Iowa, emerged onscreen as a shallow Maid of Orleans, and the film flopped.

But Hirsch emphasizes that some of Preminger's highly publicized battles were rooted in deeply felt convictions. Coming of age in Austria in the 1930s, Preminger, who was Jewish, foresaw the coming of the Nazis. Transplanted to the United States in 1935, he became a lifelong advocate for democracy and free speech. Defying the powerful Production Code Administration's demands to cut the words "virgin," "seduce" and "pregnant" from the script of "The Moon is Blue," he released the film in 1953 without their seal of approval. In subsequent films, he continued to defy the PCA and the Catholic Legion of Decency. Taking his battles to the Supreme Court, he became a major force in demolishing the ridiculous censorship that had prevailed in Hollywood since the 1930s.

Hirsch, a professor of film at Brooklyn College, supports his assertion that Preminger remains "one of the most underrated of the masters of American filmmaking" by scrutinizing markedly uneven films that are not easily categorized. From 1931 to 1979, at Twentieth Century-Fox and later as a pioneering independent, Preminger directed thrillers ("Where the Sidewalk Ends"), musicals ("Porgy and Bess"), potboilers ("Forever Amber") and epics ("Exodus"). He had hits, and he made flops.

At times Hirsch stretches for good things to say about Preminger's failures, and the author says little about Preminger's tendency to sensationalize, as in the director's florid, homophobic handling of a gay subplot in "Advise and Consent" (1962).

With Preminger's better films, Hirsch makes his case for a retrospective. He discerns significant themes and styles unifying Preminger's work. Among his specialties was a knack for dramatizing complex legal and political issues. Under his direction, "Anatomy of a Murder" became a crackling explication of "reasonable doubt," and "Advise and Consent" a depiction of the system of checks and balances at work.

Hirsch is particularly good on the final moments of "Advise and Consent," where Preminger uses one of his signature effects, the wide-angle shot, to make a point. The U.S. Senate is about to vote on whether to confirm the president's choice for secretary of state. In the foreground, senators who are unaware that the president has just died engage in debate. Above, in the background, secret service agents file into the gallery to protect the vice president (who is presiding over the Senate) because he is now the new president. "Something's happening," one of the senators observes. Indeed. Preminger's shot captures the orderly transition of power, the Constitution at work. This genuinely stirring moment, like many others Hirsch analyzes, shows that when Preminger was good, his work was something to shout about.