Cinema: Questions of Identity

Bunny Lake Is Missing. “They don’t believe Bunny really existed,” sobs Carol Lynley. And that thread of plot seldom frays in Producer-Director Otto Preminger’s big shaggy suspense thriller Though Carol claims that her four-year-old daughter Bunny was kidnaped from a London day school, no one at the school actually saw her. Virtually no one m England has seen her, it turns out. Even her toys have disappeared, and evidence suggests that the child may be a figment of her mother’s tortured imagination. With or without a daughter Carol has come to England to live with her brother, Keir Dullea, but he too seems rather vague for a lad who is described as a high-ranking magazine journalist.

After an exhilarating start, the worst thing to befall Bunny Lake is the heavy hand of Director Preminger, a man who abhors half measures. He seeks to establish mood by plunging nearly every London setting into an all but impenetrable gloom. He recklessly tips off the viewer that a key character is deranged thus siphoning off surprise from a climactic mad scene for which no Oscars will be won. Meanwhile, Martita Hunt as a dotty old schoolmistress, and Noel Coward, as a dotty old literary type strive to stop the show with their patented idiosyncrasies. To keep an eye on everyone, there is the man from Scotland Yard—dryly played by Sir Laurence Mivier, who seems bemused to find his king-sized talent tucked into so mundane a role. Obviously, Inspector Olivier has a clue that no sensible person ought to worry too much about missing Bunny.