Review: Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool on Twilight Time Blu-ray

For such an unusual and intriguing film, the Region 1 Blu-ray debut of Preminger’s Whirlpool is pretty inauspicious.

WhirlpoolIn his landmark essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” French film critic and theorist André Bazin distinguished between two types of filmmakers: those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality. Otto Preminger, the great Hollywood iconoclast, falls firmly into the latter camp. His films, with their emphasis on long takes and deep-focus cinematography over montage or showy pictorialism, offer such a perfect illustration of Bazinian realism that it’s mildly astonishing to find that the critic offered so little discussion of the director’s work in his writing. Preminger’s objective style can at times come off as detached, but it’s borne of a genuine attempt to maintain a sense of ambivalence toward his characters and their situations, to allow the audience to make up their own minds rather than controlling their responses. Preminger, in essence, is the anti-Hitchcock.

Which is what makes Whirlpool such a fascinating curiosity: a Hitchcockian suspense tale full of wild implausibilities and sensational subject matter (murder, marital infidelity, hypnosis) delivered in Preminger’s signature register of sober ambiguity. The result is a confident, controlled thriller that pulls the viewer in from the very first scene. The film opens with a woman, Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), exiting a department store and getting into her car, but just before she’s about to drive away, a store detective approaches and asks her to come back inside because he knows she’s shoplifted an expensive brooch. Ann is helped out of this jam by a mysterious man, David Korvo (Jose Ferrer), who convinces the store to show her leniency, as she’s the wife of a famous psychotherapist, William Sutton (Richard Conte).

Korvo, it turns out, is an astrologer, hypnotist, and all-around mental manipulator, who uses his knowledge of Ann’s kleptomania as leverage to persuade her to accept treatment from him. Korvo’s treatments help Ann, curing her of a recent bout of insomnia brought on by her deep anxiety over hiding her psychological issues from William, but the hypnotist has a dastardly ulterior motive: He’s drawing Ann close in order to frame her for the planned murder of his former patient, Theresa Randolph (Barbara O’Neil), a wealthy widow who’s now being treated by none other than Ann’s husband. William has no inkling of his wife’s mental distress until he gets the shocking call that she’s been arrested for killing Theresa. Unable to believe his wife capable of such a brutal act, he sets out to prove her innocence.

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Like Preminger’s more famous Laura, Whirlpool is pitched somewhere between noir, psychological thriller, and woman’s picture. The script, co-written by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, is sharp-edged and well-paced, balancing twisty puzzle-box plotting with emotionally complex characterizations. The story may take a number of unlikely turns and climaxes in a wildly implausible fashion, but somehow Preminger’s quasi-journalistic direction manages to sell the material. It helps that Tierney is so compellingly ambiguous as Ann, with a stoic façade that only hints at the depths of her chaotic mental state. Ferrer oozes oily charm as Korvo, who may be a conniving schemer, but thanks to the actor’s assured, phlegmatic performance, we can understand this man’s appeal to vulnerable women.

There’s an undeniable feminist subtext to the film, though it’s one that’s flecked by trite psychologizing and a patronizing tone toward Ann. As the wife of a Very Important Man, she seems driftless and misunderstood. She would seem to have a life of ease and luxury, and yet she rebels at the meaninglessness of it all, as well as the quiet condescension of the men in her life. But the film inadvertently mirrors the phallocentric cluelessness it attempts to indict as it shifts focus away from Ann and onto her husband’s quest to figure out her mental issues. The film’s second half largely consists of men standing around talking about Ann when she’s not in the room. Typical of Hecht’s fondness for pat psychoanalytical reasoning (see Hitchcock’s Spellbound), the film ultimately offers a shallow Freudian rationale for Ann’s kleptomania hinging on her rich father’s stinginess toward her when she was a child.

And yet, despite its faith in a certain kind of outmoded and implicitly sexist mode of psychoanalytical reasoning, the film never feels like some antiquated case study of hysteria. For one, even William himself recognizes that his wife’s problems stem from his own blindness toward her needs. If the rest of his analysis of Ann’s behavior mostly rings hollow, that’s in part because Preminger’s cool, distanced approach to this material allows us the space to form our interpretations and critiques of these people and their social mores. Ann is a woman who wants so badly to be “normal” that she’s willing to place her faith in an obvious charlatan over her own husband, supposedly an expert in the affairs of the human mind. Whirlpool may think it’s drawing a clear distinction between the hard, rigorous science of William’s psychiatry and the conniving gimcrackery of Korvo’s astrology and hypnosis.

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But despite the film’s traditionally happy ending, there’s a subtextual suggestion that the two men are merely different sides of the same coin, that William’s work is driven just as much by ambition and a lust for power as Korvo’s. Ultimately, it’s not clear either man truly understands Ann, nor knows how to help her. What they do know is how to manipulate her.

Image/Sound

The 1080p image is generally clear, and all of the sonic elements of the soundtrack, presented in both mono and stereo, are discernible. However, there’s a slight lack of distinctness in the picture quality, with some imperfections noticeable across the film, including a few scratches and an odd warping of the image that reappears several times. There’s also a very slight but audible hiss and crackle throughout. While not exactly stunning, this release—limited, like most Twilight Time discs, to a run of 3,000—presents a rare film with enough fidelity that the viewer is at least unlikely to be distracted by any audio-visual flaws.

Extras

The only significant special feature included on the disc is an audio commentary by critic Richard Schickel, who offers some insightful commentary and analysis on the film but also frequently slips into a perfunctory regurgitation of what’s on screen. The release also includes the theatrical trailer, an optional isolated music track for both the film and the trailer, and a booklet with a few stills, a reproduction of the original poster, and a brief, trivia-heavy essay by film historian Mike Finnegan. Twilight Time releases aren’t typically noted for their wealth of extras, but this disc feels especially stingy.

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Overall

For such an unusual and intriguing film, the Region 1 Blu-ray debut of Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool is pretty inauspicious.

Score: 
 Cast: Gene Tierney, Richard Conte, José Ferrer, Charles Bickford, Barbara O’Neil, Eduard Franz, Constance Collier, Fortunio Bonanova  Director: Otto Preminger  Screenwriter: Ben Hecht, Andrew Solt  Distributor: Twilight Time  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1949  Release Date: September 17, 2019  Buy: Video

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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