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BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING
Rating: 
UK. 1965.
Director/Producer – Otto Preminger, Screenplay – John & Penelope Mortimer, Based on the Novel by Evelyn Piper, Photography (b&w) – Denys Coop, Music – Paul Glass, Production Design – Don Ashton. Production Company – Columbia.
Cast:
Carol Lynley (Annie Lake), Keir Dullea (Stephen Lake), Laurence Olivier (Inspector Newmarque), Noel Coward (Horatio Wilson), Clive Revill (Andrews), Martita Hunt (Aida Ford), Anna Massey (Elvira Smollett), Suky Appleby (Bunny Lake)
Plot: Just arrived in England from the US, Annie Lake takes her four year-old daughter Bunny to her new school. Having to rush away to meet movers, she leaves Bunny alone to wait for the teacher. But when she returns Bunny is missing and nobody can remember seeing her. She calls the police. But when she goes to find a photo of Bunny for them, she discovers that all of Bunny’s things have been removed from the apartment – there is no longer any trace of Bunny and all the evidence, or lack of it, seems to points to Bunny being a figment of her imagination.
A fine psycho-thriller. It is not a thriller that is always perfectly adequate at the conventions of the form – the climactic revelation about what is happening does seem unbelievable in light of the relative rationality of the particular character’s preceding actions. But there is considerable subtlety in the film’s twisting things around on the issue of ‘Is Bunny real?’ and making it seem that Carol Lynley could well be imagining it all.
The one great pleasure about the film is watching Laurence Olivier bringing his considerable talent to bear on the relatively undemanding role of a middle-class ‘copper’, where he delivers a performance of finely shaded nuances. But for director Otto Preminger, who also made the wonderfully acerbic Laura (1944), what becomes more interesting than any straight reading of Evelyn Piper’s novel are the dark lacings he gets to add to the characters – like Noel Coward as the melodious-voiced landlord who asks the police to beat him when they come to visit, and Martita Hunt as the woman writing about the nightmares of children. These are scenes that still hold an undeniably perverse thrill today as they unquestionably did when the film came out.
It is very much a film of dark shadows – Preminger shoots with distorted closeups on faces in half-light, and there is an exciting climactic sequence with a handheld camera that demonstrates just what it was that filmmakers lost when they stopped shooting in black-and-white.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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