Bunny Lake is Missing

Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) masterfully toyed with its audience at MOMA last month with a tale of incest, intrigue, and insanity. Carol Lynley stars as an American single mother, alone in London, whose 4-year-old girl "Bunny" goes missing from elementary school on her first day. No one--including the audience--has seen Bunny, and chief detective Laurence Olivier would at least like a verifiable photograph of the child before prolonging his investigation into a second day. Lynley, a former child model and actress, was perfectly cast as the wide-eyed Ann Lake, her innocent optimism fading into a zoned-out deceitfulness, or so Preminger would have you believe. As usual in a Preminger film, the acting was superb: in addition to Olivier and Lynley, Bunny Lake featured Noel Coward as the alcoholic thespian/landlord with a collection of African masks and S&M relics (De Sade's "skull" and original whip); Martita Hunt as retired school owner Ada Ford whose studies of children's nightmares cannot but help drive the investigation forward; Kier Dullea as Lynley's brother in a performance rivaling Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock's Psycho or Karlheinz Boehm in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (both 1960). The film was adapted from a novel by Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell) that was recently republished by the CUNY Feminist Press. The wide-screen black & white cinematography by Denys Coop--who had previously shot the brilliant Billy Liar (1963) with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie--perfectly matched Preminger's sinister pseudo-noir vision that was consistent in his work, whether set in London, New York, or the California coast. Among his finest films are Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Saint Joan (1957). What separates Bunny Lake is Missing from his other work is that it is as subversive as it is suspenseful. Watch for The Zombies in an extended performance on British television performing "Just Out Of Reach" during an important scene in a local pub.