Otto Preminger (1965)
Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), an American single mother recently arrived in England, takes her four-year-old daughter Bunny for her first day at a London nursery school. When they get there, the school activities for the day have already begun. There are no teachers in evidence but Ann can’t hang around: a surprising piece of scheduling means that she’s also helping her journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea) to move flat today. The school cook (Lucie Mannheim) agrees to keep an eye on Bunny until the mid-morning break. When Ann returns in the afternoon to collect her, Bunny is nowhere to be seen. That summary of the first few minutes of Bunny Lake is Missing omits to mention that we don’t see the child during Ann’s morning visit to the nursery school. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier), who leads the police investigation into Bunny’s disappearance, learns that Ann Lake, when she was a child, had a fantasy friend called Bunny. Newhouse quickly begins to doubt if Ann’s vanished daughter exists or existed at all. The mystery is solved less than twenty-fours after Ann first entered the nursery school so the Met inquiry can’t easily be accused of dragging its feet but Stephen Lake thinks otherwise. He threatens to use his position as a journalist to create a scandal in the press over the police handling of the case: ‘You don’t seem to be taking this seriously …!’ Stephen yells at Supt Newhouse. This is an accusation that could also be levelled at Otto Preminger.
The film’s screenplay, credited to John and Penelope Mortimer, is adapted from a 1957 novel (of the same name but with the action set in New York) by Merriam Modell, writing, as she usually did, as Evelyn Piper. I don’t know how much the plotting of Bunny Lake is Missing – to describe this as ‘flawed’ would be kind – is down to the screenwriters and how much a legacy of the source material but Preminger’s approach is whimsical, verging on careless. In an eclectic cast list, the standouts are The Zombies. My favourite bit in the whole picture was a scene in a pub, where a television is broadcasting a news report (read by Tim Brinton, the real-life newscaster and future Tory MP) about Bunny’s disappearance. The landlord promptly switches channels, to The Zombies performing on Ready Steady Go! Perhaps Preminger means to suggest that London is already so swinging that pop is generally a priority there but, since he’s filled the pub with extras nearly all middle-aged or elderly, the effect is bizarre and comical. (The Zombies had their only Top Twenty hit, in mid-1964, with ‘She’s Not There’. As well as being an excellent single, this would seem the perfect theme song for the film so it’s a double pity it’s not what the group are performing on Ready Steady Go!)
At this point in the pub scene, you can sympathise with Ann Lake’s paranoid feeling that all London is conspiring against her. Ann is mostly, though, a serious weakness of the film. This is partly because Carol Lynley isn’t a strong enough actress for the role – you rarely get a sense of the mother’s desperation about her child’s disappearance. But Preminger could have done more to help Lynley raise doubts in the audience’s mind about Ann’s mental equilibrium. If, for example, the staff at the nursery school had been directed to react ambiguously to Bunny’s vanishing, it would have been possible for the viewer to realise the teachers felt guilty about what they’d allowed to happen and so were touchy, but to understand too that Ann saw their reaction as something more sinister. As it is, the teachers are so emphatically and improbably unsympathetic (even though one of them is Anna Massey) that Ann’s reaction to their insensitivity is entirely understandable and doesn’t at all suggest that she’s imagining things.
As Supt Newhouse, Laurence Olivier is able, with little apparent effort, to achieve the ambiguity that the nursery school personnel lack. He expertly blurs the difference between cool professionalism and cold scepticism so that you understand the effect the detective is having on Ann Lake. His underplaying is really rather brilliant – if there are times when the whiff of bored contempt he exudes seems the actor’s rather than the character’s, you can hardly blame Olivier. The script doesn’t seem to decide, and Preminger doesn’t appear to care, whether Newhouse, when he begins to think Bunny never existed, believes that Ann Lake is a sincerely deluded fantasist or a time-wasting nuisance. You feel it should be the former but, if so, I missed any indication that Newhouse thought she or the police investigation therefore needed the help of a psychiatrist. Ann buys sweets for Bunny after dropping her off at school; later, she remembers that she took one of the child’s toys for repair the previous day and has a receipt to prove it. Both these things cause her to claim excitedly to her brother, ‘They’ll have to believe me now!’ This struck me as optimistic if the police thought Ann had crazily but conscientiously resurrected the imaginary friend of her childhood – but that’s a quibble compared with some of the other holes in the plotting and/or lead performances.
In the event, a ship’s passenger list is crucial evidence of Bunny Lake’s reality but the police haven’t thought at an earlier stage to make a transatlantic phone call to find out more about Ann’s life in the US, which she left only a few days previously. Although I didn’t know the denouement before seeing the film, Keir Dullea is so android-creepy from the outset that you know Stephen Lake is either a bright-red herring or seriously dodgy. The nursery school personnel and the police initially assume that the Lakes are husband and wife; the viewer perceives, no less immediately, an incestuous glint in Dullea’s staring eyes. It transpires that Stephen has abducted Bunny; Ann watches him bury the little girl’s possessions then remove the sedated child from the boot of his car before preparing her for burial too. (It might have been simpler to kill Bunny first but never mind.) When Ann confronts Stephen, he accuses her of loving Bunny more than she loves him – just as, in childhood, the fantasy Bunny made Stephen jealous until he put an end to the imaginary friendship. Although Ann seems no more surprised than the audience is to discover that Stephen is completely bonkers, she has never expressed the slightest suspicion in their numerous private conversations that Bunny’s disappearance might have something to do with the mad possessiveness her brother has shown before. Bunny (Suky Appleby), once she comes round and joins in the children’s games Stephen and Ann replay in the protracted climax to the story, is, in the circumstances, almost pathologically undemonstrative. By the end of the film, you wonder if it’s the actors playing the Lakes who should have been billed as The Zombies.
Those games – as an indicator that a key character is psychologically arrested in childhood – must have been a tired idea well over a half a century ago. Preminger anticipates them in the sequence at the dolls’ hospital (the surgeon is Finlay Currie) in which Ann, trying to find Bunny’s toy, wanders round the dark basement among rows of naked dolls with, inevitably, a music box tune tinkling eerily on the soundtrack. The ominous set dressing in the film is just that – set dressing. Ann’s malignant landlord, Horacio Wilson (Noel Coward), owns a collection of African masks: he puts one of the more alarming ones on his new tenant’s bed, as it were on Preminger’s behalf, to create an instant spooky effect. Wilson is an aging actor and a randy abusive drunk. The Mortimers have written some impressively nasty lines for Noel Coward, which he delivers ‘inimitably’ but with undeniable vicious bite. There are red herrings in Bunny Lake: Wilson is one such; Miss Ford – the now retired teacher, ensconced in an attic of the nursery school where she’s writing a book about children’s fantasies – is another. (I gather that in the original novel, however, the equivalent character is far from a red herring – she’s Bunny’s abductor.) Martita Hunt is entertaining as Miss Ford and this is one of several decent supporting performances in the film. Clive Revill, cast against eccentric type, is commendably uncharismatic as Newhouse’s sidekick, Sergeant Andrews. In a cameo as a hospital sister, Megs Jenkins is, as usual, good.
The BFI’s programme note included an extract from a piece by the French critic and film historian Jean-Pierre Coursodon, who describes Bunny Lake is Missing as Otto Preminger’s ‘last great film’. Coursodon recognises that it may be subject to adverse criticism from ‘[plot]-conscious critics and sticklers for verisimilitude’ but insists that to ‘anyone the least bit sensitive to form … the triumphant flow of visual movement that keeps the action going for all of its 107 minutes is wonderful excitement’. Bunny Lake, for all its faults, is moderately entertaining, and I’m not very – perhaps not ‘the least bit’ – sensitive to form. But how anyone can watch a psychological mystery thriller and experience it as purely formally as Coursodon seems to have done is … well, a psychological mystery.
30 July 2015
