Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

Pretty Good

I wanted to but couldn't!

Absolutely Fantastic

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's strange and disappointing to find a writer like John Mortimer guilty of sloppiness. The plot is an uneasy hybrid of So Long At The Fair - Jean Simmons travels to Paris with her bother who promptly disappears leaving no record he was ever there - and Gaslight - a man attempts to drive his wife mad in which four-year old Bunny Lake disappears from a Nursery school on her very first day yet no one - staff, pupils, parents, deny ever seeing her. Mortimer's sloppiness manifests itself in several ways; 1) The audience does not see the child, what we see is the mother, Ann (Carol Lynley) looking for a member of staff having deposited her daughter in the First Day Room. There is absolutely no logical reason why we should not see the child other than the fact that one of the plot points is that the child is the figment of a disturbed mothers' imagination and this lends it credence; 2) Lynley tells the cook where the child is and the cook agrees to tell the relevant staff (although it's highly unlikely that a caring mother WOULD leave a child unattended for no real reason let alone a viable one, especially when both mother and child have just arrived in the country; 3) unrealistically, within minutes of Ann leaving the nursery the cook quits her job on the flimsiest pretense so is not there to confirm Ann's story. 4) towards the end of the film Ann finds a receipt from a doll's hospital where the doll is undergoing restoration and dashes off to the hospital which is apparently located in the West End. Her cab is caught in traffic and the driver explains that this is 'theatre' traffic and tells Ann she will be better walking. She leaves the cab and proceeds on foot; hardly has she entered the shop - after business hours but the door is conveniently open - than her brother, who she left in Hampstead, pulls up outside the shop, in a now traffic-free road. Extreme sloppiness. Finally, no attempt is made to explain just why Ann's brother, who is holding down a responsible job, is suddenly revealed as psychotic. If you can take stuff like this in your stride you may well enjoy this.

The American single mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) seeks out someone in the nursery Little People's Garden School in Hampstead. She finds a German cook and explains that she has just moved from the United States to London and she left her daughter Bunny Lake at the First Day Room alone with a baby. Now she needs to receive the delivery men at the apartment she rented and she needs to leave Bunny for a moment and the cook says that she can check on her daughter. When Ann returns, she does not find neither the cook nor Bunny and no one in the nursery seems to have seen the girl. Ann calls her brother Steven Lake (Keir Dullea) and the police. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) investigates the case with his men and there is no evidence of the little girl. Soon he begins to question whether Bunny Lake does exist or is Ann's imaginary daughter."Bunny Lake Is Missing" is an intriguing and mysterious thriller directed by Otto Preminger. The screenplay keeps the mystery and the tension until the end, when the viewer discovers the truth about Bunny Lake. The black and white cinematography is beautiful and the film shows the English rock band The Zombies in a television broadcast. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): Not available on DVD or Blu-Ray.

If "Bunny Lake Is Missing" isn't one of Otto Preminger's masterpieces it is, nevertheless, a terrifically entertaining psychological thriller, beautifully directed, written and acted. It's about the disappearance of a little girl in London; the conundrum is, did she exist in the first place. It was adapted, by the Mortimers, John and Penelope, from a novel by Evelyn Piper and it allows a number of very fine actors, as well as Keir Dullea, the opportunity to strut their stuff superbly. There's Laurence Olivier as a pragmatic policeman, that fine and underrated actress Carol Lynley as the distraught mother, Noel Coward and Martita Hunt as eccentrics and Dullea, surprisingly good, as Lynley's over-possessive brother while there are several very neat cameos from a host of well-known British character actors. There are enough clues scattered through the picture to figure it all out long before the somewhat protracted denouement yet even after several viewings the film has lost none of its appeal. Special mention should also be given to Denys Coop's superb black and white cinematography, (it's shot in Panavision), as well as Paul Glass' wonderfully atmospheric score.

Maybe I am the first non UK or US person who post a review here about this film. I think the film was for Premminger, a opportunity to show his anxiety about the fragility of the western democracy. The film was made few years after the very terrible years of McCarthy time, where the repression and persecution by political reason typical for a totalitarian state. In "Bunny Lake Is Missing" he try to show how easy the state institution can lose there function and can become a tool for abusive and repressive Ararat. It 's help us to know Otto Premminger background if we want to understand his movies. He is much more sofisticate than the usual Hollywood film maker, maybe that's the reason why he use to make theater in NY.When we watch his movies we can think from the ideological point of view he was a humanist, a kind of left-liberal. He has not really a country, he belong not really to a nation, but he is a great human. Therefore the film "Bunny Lake Is Missing" is more a subversive film than a Hitchcock copy.