Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Margin For Error/A Royal Scandal"

This BFI two-disc set is quite the nifty pack­age for the would-be Preminger com­plet­ist who’s not overly troubled by the var­ied vicis­situdes of the cur­rent glob­al eco­nom­ic situ­ation. Error is the pumped-up-for-wartime 1943 adapt­a­tion of a (by all accounts lousy) 1939 Claire Booth Luce play. Preminger dir­ec­ted and cost­arred in the Broadway ver­sion, play­ing the slimy New-York-stationed German coun­sul. He agreed to reprise his role for the Fox film ver­sion, how­ever, only in exchange for the oppor­tun­ity to dir­ect. This mach­in­a­tion allowed him to relaunch a film career that had foundered in the wake of a feud with Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck. For that reas­on alone, Error is an import­ant film.

Other extra-diegetic points of interest include the above-pictured Preminger’s pin-prick sharp per­form­ance, in which, among oth­er things, he trades barbs with future “Uncle Miltie” Milton Berle, here play­ing a Jewish cop reluct­antly safe­guard­ing the German embassy. Said barbs, with Berle mouth­ing a lot of pat­ri­ot­ic New-Yawkisms, were largely craf­ted by Preminger and young Samuel Fuller, a Preminger discovery. 

Eventually a con­vo­luted who­dun­nit with a wrapup that would­n’t sat­is­fy the most per­func­tory Ellery Queen read­er, Error is also replete with black­mail, sexu­al and oth­er­wise, and spec­u­lat­ive trad­ing in human life…pretty squal­id stuff, were it allowed to register. But this dish is garn­shed with so much war­time pro­pa­ganda corn that one barely notices the mani­fest­a­tions of evil that we’re sup­posed to be war­ring against. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his recent crit­ic­al bio­graphy of Preminger, Error is “earn­est and empty, sur­pris­ing and eer­ie in its hol­low­ness.” As the screen cap above attests, the BFI disc of it looks pretty damn good. 

1945’s A Royal Scandal is anoth­er anom­aly, a would-be Lubitsch film (indeed, its title card calls it “Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘A Royal Scandal‘”) whose dir­ec­tion was taken over by Lubitsch’s friend and apostle Preminger after Lubitsch health dis­al­lowed him from helm­ing the film. A com­ic treat­ment of the loves of Catherine the Great, it stars stage legend Tallulah Bankhead in one of her infre­quent screen turns. 

This was Preminger’s first assign­ment after the artist­ic break­through that was Laura, but his heart’s clearly not in it. (Reasons? Clashes with pro­du­cer Lubitsch, for one. Fujiwara also sug­gests that Preminger was mov­ing past, and reject­ing, the “pleas­ure prin­ciple” in favor of the “real­ity prin­ciple,” and that mak­ing such fluff would no longer do.) The fluid­ity of Laura is here replaced with a sta­gi­ness and iner­tia that Preminger’s mov­ing cam­era would dis­pense with for good in his very next pic­ture, the breath­tak­ing Fallen Angel. Nevertheless, with the likes of Charles Coburn, a radi­ant Ann Baxter, Vincent Price, and Sig Ruman among the play­ers, and giv­en its silly but rol­lick­ing script by Edwin Justus Mayer and Bruno Frank, this is a more than watch­able bit of Old Hollywood at its most ornately insubstantive. 

This sharp, crisp ver­sion of Scandal auto­mat­ic­ally renders obsol­ete the French Columbia edi­tion, which fea­tured burnt-in sub­titles as well as a dingy picture. 

There are no extras on either of the BFI discs, but the pack­age includes a book­let fea­tur­ing stills, cred­its, and sol­id back­ground essays by Phillip Kemp. All yours for about 25 bucks American, as of today.