Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

A young woman shows up at a kindergarten at the end of a school day to pick up her daughter but is told that the people at the school don't have her child. In fact, they say they've never seen this young woman or her daughter. Does the daughter exist? Is the young woman crazy? Or is something more sinister going on?

That's the basic set up from Evelyn Piper's novel Bunny Lake Is Missing, and it's the same set up that director Otto Preminger takes for his movie version. It's a great hook for a story. What Preminger does with the rest of the film, however, is a deviation from Piper's novel. Some of these deviations work and some don't.

In brief, Preminger and his screenwriters John and Penelope Mortimer transport the story from New York to London. They give the young woman a new name, Ann, and they give her a devoted brother, Stephen. They also give her a sympathetic police inspector played by Lawrence Oliver to deal with.

As the movie progresses, Ann finds herself increasingly alone in her quest to find the daughter who may or may not exist. This quest leads her into a weird nighttime London that pulses with a noirish energy. Preminger was a master of mood, as well as a master of noir, and he correctly identified the Gothic quality of Piper's novel. One the great scenes in the book--the heroine's descent into a weird doll hospital in the middle of the night--translates into one of the great scenes in the movie. Preminger loves the twisted quality of the characters here, some of which are nice additions. The old lady who lives above the school and has an unhealthy interest in the dreams and nightmares of children. The drunk and lecherous landlord played with smarmy foppishness by Noel Coward. These are grotesques masquerading as people, and Preminger loves them and embraces that quality for the entire movie.

You can see this most clearly at work in a sequence I can't talk about. Preminger and the Mortimers have reconfigured the ending of the story from the novel, and I don't want to give it away. I will only say this about the ending of the movie: it's really, truly weird. It's the weirdest ten minutes this director ever put on screen, and the tension underneath that weirdness keeps escalating right up until the end. It's great piece of movie making.

And yet, the filmmakers here have made some substantial mistakes. For one thing, the essential conceit of the story--the main character is alone in her search--is compromised by the creation of the character of the brother. Understand, I'm not against adapters changing the story from the source material. I don't think an adapter needs to feel any fidelity to the original text; his or her first job is to make a good movie. The creation of the brother here, however, has consequences for the way we receive the story. After all, if the brother believes Bunny exists, well, it seems that much more reasonable to think that she does exist. Without giving too much away, I'll say that we find out certain things about the brother which make us begin to doubt his testimony, but we only get that information an hour or so into the movie. Up until that point, he dilutes the suspense rather than heightening it.

It's interesting to compare it to the novel and see how certain choices impact the audience. For instance, in the book our heroine is mostly alone and we have a much clearer idea of the kind of shame she lives with because she is an unmarried woman with a child. The movie distances us from her, while the book pulls us closer to her. Yet the book is arguably more suspenseful because even though we're closer to her--we're inside her head most of the time--we still don't know if she's crazy or not.

Bunny Lake Is Missing is still a fun movie, though--a nighttime quest through a rogue's gallery of freaks and weirdos. And that weird ending is a whopper.

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Check out my review of Evelyn Piper's original novel on Friday's Forgotten Books on the great blog, Pattinase.

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There's talk of a remake of Bunny Lake to be directed by Joe Carnahan, director of Narc, a movie I liked a lot. I think he's a talented guy, and I'm encouraged that the screenwriter on the project is the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Doug Wright. I'm always a little dubious of remakes (for instance, I think the original Grey Gardens is a masterpiece, one of the great documentaries, one of the great movies period--and I won't see the new movie Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. Call me a purist), but I'm willing to be surprised. What the filmmakers need to do is to figure out how to bridge the best parts of the Piper's novel and the best parts of Preminger's movie while cutting out the weakest parts of both. If they can pull this off, they'll have a hell of a movie on their hands.