Bunny Lake a disparu

Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) is an American recently settled in London. She comes to pick up her daughter Bunny after her first day and finds her missing. Nobody seems to know anything about her. Her brother magazine reporter Steven Lake (Keir Dullea) is the only one who knows her. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) investigates but soon wonders if she has made the whole thing up.

This movie starts off with such a powerful compelling sequence as Ann Lake try to find her daughter at the school. It's a nightmare that is close to heart for every parent. However as it goes on, I found the movie to be uneven. Olivier is able to hold the various pieces together but I found the brother to be unreal. Director Otto Preminger made a very interesting movie that I found some parts to be more compelling than others. Overall, I found the good parts to be so great that the less good parts aren't that bothersome.

Stuffed with wonderful character actors and recognisably shabby locations - like the little school in an old house where the cook is making junket (whatever happened to junket?). Her accent is familiar: she once played a beautiful spy in 39 Steps, warning of leaking "secrets vital to your air defence". After many viewings, it's easy to forget that it's a mystery and everyone is a suspect. Has Bunny been abducted by sinister Martita Hunt (the slightly dotty founder of the school)? Or creepy Noel Coward (the landlord)? The Zombies song "Just Out of Reach" keeps being reprised.

They were more famous, though, for a song called "She's Not There". How's that for intertextuality? The script is by John and Penelope Mortimer. John is famous for the Rumpole series, and Laurence Olivier's detective has echoes of Rumpole, muttering that bus conductors never notice anything - they are dreamers and philosophers. Noel Coward's character too is very Mortimerian: "There are many at the BBC who bear bruises left by the love of Horatio Wilson." Mortimer reveres Shakespeare and Conan Doyle and sometimes it shows.

The plot is stuffed, sometimes clunkily, with issues that were only just beginning to be spoken about: perversion (in the person of whip-wielding Horatio), teen pregnancy (Anne Lake seems about 20), unmarried motherhood and abortion. Anne chose to have her baby and raise it on her own. This is still a difficult course of action, but in 1965 it was groundbreaking, especially if you were - as she is - middle class.

The vast range of responses to and assessments of this movie here are a tribute to what an odd film this is in many ways. And it's difficult to comment on some of its oddest features (chiefly the performances of Dullea and Lynley) without giving away aspects of the plot that it's best you don't know when seeing the movie. I guess it's safe to say that I found both of these performances underwhelming but adequate. To be fair, both of them come off better by the end of the film than they do in its first third. Your take on Lynley's character will definitely evolve as the film progresses, which must in some degree be to her credit.

But by far the most compelling reason to see the film is Olivier's rich and understated performance from the period post-Archie Rice but pre-Othello. It takes a while for his character to appear, but once he arrives, he is unquestionably the center of the film, at the true heart of what's good about it. (The last 20 minutes of the film, maligned elsewhere in these IMDB comments, would probably have benefited greatly from a little more of his presence.)

His every moment onscreen is fascinating and worthwhile, and the script gives him some fine moments of verbal eccentricity which he delivers with variety and brilliance -- we leave this film wanting to know even more about his character, because he just seems so interesting beneath the surface.

Also a plus is that occupying nearly every small part in this film is a truly fine British character actor, with the old dotty schoolmistress Miss Ford (Anna Massey, I believe) a standout. But everyone, from the various employees of the little girl's school to Olivier's sidekick to the fellow manning the shipping counter, are fabulously well-played. And then of course, there's Noel Coward....who gives a truly perverse performance in what amounts to only three scenes.

The combination of black & white photography and widescreen, while not all that uncommon, would soon be all but extinct by the time this film was made (at least until our more recent era, when it's made a conspicuous comeback), but it makes for a very effective look and feel to the movie, often dark and noirish, with somes an almost documentary-like grittiness, but always very well-composed and a large part of the film's success. On television, it's nearly impossible to see it in widescreen, and in fact the TV print isn't even pan-and-scan -- it's just stationary and incomplete, so over and over again we hear people talking whom we KNOW are on camera, but they're invisible to us. No attempt was made in the TV transfer to even bother to scan. It's definitely true that the film is less effective without the widescreen component, but it's still watchable, because you can clearly tell what you're NOT seeing, if that makes any sense at all!

One final note: I originally tracked this film down over a decade ago because of the interesting score by composer Paul Glass, totally unknown to me except for this film. Way back when, the soundtrack (on vinyl) for this film was kind of rare, and I had a copy and really loved the music. In the context of the film, the score alternates oddly between working quite well and being inappropriate or irritating. Sometimes (during the scene in the doll hospital for example) you can understand what the logic was behind the musical choice, but it's intrusive and simply not working. The score also adopts the unfortunate "in-joke" of having some variant of the main title melody (which is quite lovely and fitting for the film, featuring recorder, strings, woodwinds and what seems to be a soprano sax to good effect to create the "child's world" motive to open the first 15 minutes of the film) ALWAYS be present as source music. For example, when we see Noel Coward in his apartment, a radio or phonograph is playing some kind of muzak version of the theme. There's another scene in a bar where the main title theme is playing jazzily. This sort of thing rarely works, and it's particularly egregious in this film. (John Williams once lampooned the practice in his score for THE LONG GOODBYE). But a few blunders aside, Glass manages to do a great job balancing the really expressive simplicity of his rather pastoral tune with some really fine dissonant, percussive, atonal cues. The score sounds like nobody else in particular, yet is very distinctive, which I mean as a compliment to the mysterious Mr. Glass.

All in all, an interesting enough effort, with a really well-written screenplay. One can imagine it looked great on paper when it was offered to Olivier, though perhaps the film turned out a little less successfully than might have been hoped for. But it's definitely worth seeing.

Ironically enough, 'Bunny Lake is Missing' actually was missing for years - not listed in movie guides, not on VHS, only rarely making a ghostly appearance on the late late show.

Fortunately it's being remade with a major young star, Reese Witherspoon. Can't wait to see it, Witherspoon was really good in a movie with Keifer Sutherland where she plays a teen runaway.

So as a result of the remake the original is due out on DVD! So technology really does lead to better living.

BLIM is a very well-made, scary movie. Don't watch it alone, unless you are not easily made, well, uneasy. Not a slasher type movie, or a 'watch out it's going to get you ' scariness, but a psychological thriller.

Like other movies from the 1960's set in Europe, Bunny Lake is austere and stark, the characters have an emotionally remote manner, as if in a trance. Other examples are Alfie, Blow-up, Georgy Girl, and the horrifying Repulsion, the last of which if you are going to try to watch at all, you should not do alone, and you should be warned that it's no picnic watching even Catherine Deneuve come totally unglued while no one seems to suspect a thing.

The various settings in the movie, that should be quaint, innocuous or at worst drab but end up being terrifying in their shadowy oddness. A children's day care center, an apartment, a hospital, and a 'doll hospital'.

Maybe the discordant soundtrack of various whistle-y pan pipe -y sounds is a big reason for the desolate mood of the film.

You just fall in love with beatific Carol Lynley, she is adorable in this and very brave, after all if we are having to watch this nightmare her character is actually living it.

Supporting cast boasts kindly detective Sir Larry Olivier, leering neighbor Noel Coward and high-handed brother Keir Dullea.

If you enjoy this one, you may also enjoy 'The Shuttered Room' another scary flick from 1960s Britain with Miss Lynley being threatened by dastardly Oliver Reed as an evil country lout. Haven't seen it in decades but it scared us as children.

This engaging psycho-thriller truly is an overlooked treasure and probably the most underrated of all of the great Otto Preminger's films. I always thought that Carol Lynley was a very beautiful woman and a very strong presence in motion pictures, but until I saw BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, I never realized what a magnificent actress Miss Lynley truly is. As the frantic single mom searching for her little girl who seems to have disappeared without a trace, Miss Lynley gives the performance of a lifetime, and Keir Dullea is also impressive as Lynley's concerned brother. Laurence Olivier, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward, and Finlay Currie are also in there doing their usual wonderful work. A must-see, especially for the mystery lover.