The Man Who Would Be King.

Reading the chapter called Miss Iowa in Foster Hirsch's biography, a couple of things stand out to me. The first is that Otto wasn't a man known for his empathy. Rita Moriarty organised the English crew for him and recalled that he just didn't understand people. He was interested in them, but he didn't understand them.

Watching, but not understanding. Viewing, observing, but not understanding. Does this explain his distance when he directs too? He made a quip to an unmarried colleague; Will you let me pick a wife for you? After all, I am the man who is going to select Saint Joan. Eeeek.

Poor Jean Seberg, picked from out of 3000 young girls who auditioned for him, as he liked her 'charm and sincerity'. He also liked her smile, her all-American vigour and the confident way she carried herself. I think Otto chose Jean because in the end he thought he could manipulate her more easily, said his stepson.

The next key element from the chapter is screenwriter Arthur Laurents' absolute disdain for the novel and for Sagan herself.

When I read Sagan's book in French, I thought it was a hot fudge sundae that might well become a best seller, but I also thought it was a trick, and indeed it turned out to be her fifteen minutes...when I met her, I thought she was cultivating an attitude. She was pretending to be jaded, which she was too young to be. She was of the moment - it was chic to be depraved at that moment - and at the time she was taken seriously. A lesbian who lived a very fast life, she was quite unattractive, and that always helps to be taken seriously.

The process of adapting the novel into a screenplay was done quickly; it took two minutes. I'm sure that's not true, but what was true was that he did it for money rather than love; I couldn't have cared less about that story, and was left alone by Preminger to get on with it. He really just left me on my own, with one basic instruction, that we are to be removed from the characters, who don't have passionate emotions. Otto thought that kind of distance was 'high style'.

He disagreed with Preminger's casting choices, particularly Jean Seberg:

She was lovely, but I felt she was performing as an innocent young American girl...I was told Otto liked to watch her take a bath. He turned on her when he found out she was sleeping with a French lawyer...he had thought she was a virgin and he felt betrayed. He wanted to think of her as his virgin. European men don't understand American women. Jean was posing, acting American innocence, and Otto had fallen hook line and sinker for this cornfield approach. He was besotted. An intelligent, cultured man, Otto had fallen for...a virgin...After I turned in the script, I saw Saint Joan and I immediately cabled Otto: "Jean will sink me, you, and the picture."

Geoffrey Horne also noticed there was something a little fraudulent about her, a conflict between the American girl she was, and the European girl she was trying to be. She would walk into the make-up room in panties to show she was liberated, but it was fake. She was trying so hard to be sophisticated.

Poor Jean Seberg. Selected for her small town crudentials, her American-ness, her imagined virginity, and then manipulated into performing a character that was written without 'passionate emotion' by a director without any empathy. Geoffrey Horne added that Otto didn't really seem to have any sense about actors as people. I don't remember him directing for actors at all. "Stand here, move there," he'd bark.

Ironically though, the French thought his approach to French material was revelatory. Of course, Truffaut's (and later Godard's) appreciation of Seberg is legendary, but Parisian critics credited Preminger with wise insights about the national psyche. Even 30 years later:

The genius of Preminger completely bursts with the discovery of a musicality in the movements of the bodies and the character's consciousness. The film is some sort of abstract painting where the mixture of black and white with vivid colours, of a rocky and liquid nature with the pyschological insignificance of the characters, brings forth a particular sensuality which Godard will remember for Le Mepris.

Hirsch further states that the film also anticipates Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni's L'Aventura (1961), which also explore the alienation of the European upper bourgeoisie. The Italian films are far more ambitious than Bonjour Tristesse, but it was Preminger who first sensed the subject's potential.

Very interesting. This deliberate choice by Preminger to choose alienation and distance over empathy and knowing, and how this has been read as high style, abstract and revelatory - more French than French.