Editor's note: This week's Film Noir selection is from one of the most highly-regarded film noir historians, Foster Hirsch. His new book Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King
was just published by Knopf. The book is an epic biography of the legendary Viennese-born filmmaker. Preminger made many different styles of film but for me he'll always be known as a noir director. His film noir Whirlpool was successful but far from his best. The strange little drama is entertaining, improbable and even a bit silly. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. Mr Hirsch sent me this introduction and allowed us to use an excerpt from the book on the blog.by Foster Hirsch
Otto Preminger’s standing at Fox during the last years of his contract, from the late 1940s to 1953, was a disappointment to him as well as to his boss, Darryl Zanuck. Following the success of Laura in 1944, Preminger worked in a number of genres – he did not want to be typecast as a director of thrillers or murder mysteries -- often with quite respectable results. But no single film had landed with the impact of his celebrated salon noir. And given his temperament – Otto was born to give rather than follow orders – by the late 1940s he was eager to branch off on his own as a complete independent producer-director. Succumbing somewhat reluctantly to the “genius” of the system, which argued the wisdom of always returning to the scene of your first success, Preminger, in 1949 and 1950, decided to make three psychological thrillers in a row. He knew the genre (which nobody at the time referred to as film noir) was a good fit for him and each of the scripts, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool, and The Thirteenth Letter, contained the psychological perversities and ambivalence that he was always drawn to. Of the three thrillers, Whirlpool, which takes place in the homes of well-to-do characters in Beverly Hills, was the most congenial – Where the Sidewalk Ends has a gritty, hard-boiled, mean streets milieu and The Thirteenth Letter takes place in a bleak small town in Canada. But Preminger directs all three films with the kind of glacial control that had distinguished his direction of Laura. At the time of their release the films were not regarded as in any way important, in fact were markers of the director’s fallen estate at the studio. Since then, the films have had substantial critical rehabilitation and are now generally regarded as essential contributions to the era of classic noir.
As José Ferrer, Whirlpool's costar, recalled, “Otto and Zanuck hoped that the film, which is like a sequel to Laura– it had the same star, the same mood and atmosphere – would have the same success.” Like Laura, Whirlpool is a sleek thriller about the well-to-do. Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), the fashionable, neurotic wife of a prominent psychoanalyst, is kleptomaniac. When she is arrested at an upscale department store for stealing a broach, she is save by Korvo (José Ferrer), an astrologer and hypnotist who specializes in separating gullible rich women from their money. Korvo convinces Ann that he can cure her; his real goal, however, is to implicate her in the murder of his ex-mistress, a patient of Ann's husband. At the end, Korvo is gunned down in front of the large portrait of the woman he has killed.
Working with experienced screenwriters like Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, Preminger could not get the convoluted plot to gel. But his shrewd casting of the two leads helped to offset the damage. As the unstable heroine Gene Tierney, who had already suffered periods of mental illness and in later years was to have a harrowing history of breakdowns followed by fragile recoveries, is startling effective. Korvo's comment to Ann, that she has become imprisoned in her role as a pampered, dressed-to-perfection housewife, is also a comment on Tierney's own “perfection” as a well-behaved Hollywood mannequin. As Korvo (kuervo in Yiddish is a male prostitute, an apt description of the character's gigolo manner), José Ferrer offers the enticing spectacle of a phony actor playing a phony actor. The hamminess that was to curdle almost all Ferrer's work is exactly the point here: Korvo is an out-and-out charlatan. For the other major role, that of the society therapist with a trophy wife, Preminger made a rare casting flub: in a tuxedo Richard Conte looks and sounds like a thug. “Conte was a big mistake,” Ferrer said. “We all felt while we were shooting the film. He suggested a New York street type rather than a well-educated psychiatrist.”
The director and his cinematographer Arthur Miller gild Whirlpool with many visual pleasures. Mirror shots of the troubled
heroine in her well-appointed home – as in Laura the objects of the rich are made to glisten – underline the character's duality. In a brilliant sequence of noir iconography, under hypnosis and performing the script Korvo has provided, Ann leaves her house and drives to the house of the murdered woman. The camera is placed at odd, transfiguring angles; diagonal shadows cover the walls of Ann's house and of the hilltop house of the dead woman whose portrait looms over her living room like a malevolent deity. The shot in which Gene Tierney stands before the portrait is an obvious homage to Laura and a rare moment of self-quotation in Preminger's oeuvre. David Raksin's theme song (“nice, but not great,” as the composer recalled) evokes the heroine's descent into a vortex.
The busboys in my hotels make better money than that.” And, later, he contemptuously browbeats his second-in-command: “Go to bed. Stay there. You been sick, understand – sick. And if they take you to police headquarters, shoot yourself in the head. It’ll make everything a lot simpler.” The second-in-command that Brown addresses is Joe McClure (
author Kenneth L. Geist relates how intensively the second-time director coached his first-time leading lady, Nancy Guild. Unlike Lauren Bacall, however, Guild had never acted before being signed to a movie contract, and she doesn’t quite navigate the type of lines supplied to her by Mankiewicz the screenwriter—lines that Bacall or 
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