In 1963 Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinéma his list of the top ten American sound films of all time. It featured many of the usual suspects -- Vertigo, The Searchers -- and one film you'd never expect, at least not these days . . . Angel Face (above), a classic film noir directed by Otto Preminger.
Among the French New Wave directors, Preminger was considered one of the masters of cinema, who could be spoken of in the same breath with Welles or Ford. Today he holds a place somewhere between Cecil B. DeMille and Fred Zinneman -- considered a first-rate showman, as an incarnation of the directorial persona, but otherwise a merely competent craftsman of studio product.
I really can't explain what happened to his reputation as an artist. Perhaps the theatricality and commercial calculation of his directorial persona cheapened him, made him seem less than serious, as it did for DeMille and even Hitchcock for many years. Truffaut made Hitchcock respectable again, and DeMille seems to be undergoing reevaluation these days. Preminger is admired, if he's thought of at all, for his early noirs, and for the noirish Laura. The major works of his later years are appreciated somewhat less enthusiastically.
These later films, like In Harm's Way, for example, have the feel of standard studio prestige pictures of their time -- but in truth they're far more interesting than that, certainly on a visual, cinematic level. They are filled with movies within movies -- elaborately choreographed scenes that often play out in one or two shots with a highly mobile camera. These passages are breathtaking -- they impart a sense of being someplace rather than of watching something.
They are, as the New Wave critics might have put it, passages of pure cinema -- examples of the discursive style largely lost to mainstream movies since the coming of sound. Ford, also working in the mainstream, got away with this sort of thing mostly because he worked in genre -- in Westerns we were supposed to sit back and enjoy watching men ride horses through spectacular spaces. But the long tracking shot that contains almost the whole first scene of In Harm's Way, set at a naval officers' party in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor, is very unusual in a big-budget studio melodrama. It's exceptionally effective -- drawing us into the time and place on a subliminal level, making us feel vulnerable to the Japanese attack that's unleashed the next morning.
Almost all of Preminger's films have passages like this and they linger in the mind, even if the film as a whole is disappointing. Bonjour Tristesse is one of the most disappointing of Preminger's films, but its mood and sense of place were the things Godard riffed on to produce Contempt -- which is almost a formal variation on the visual and dramatic themes of the earlier work. (And of course it was Jean Seberg's odd but compelling performance in Bonjour Tristesse that inspired Godard to cast her in Breathless.)
Preminger is due, overdue, for a comprehensive critical reevaluation.