"I appear on the television, you know."

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"They pay me to make use of my melodious voice. I sing rude old Welsh ballads. I recite a few things of my own... and then I give them Elizabethan drama. And all in exchange for one whiskey... served to me in the first aid room. I could, if you like... give you a private performance. I'm told that my voice... is extremely seductive.It seems to unleash whole hurricanes of passion... in the breasts of the females who watch me on the BBC.

Perhaps you should sample the wine... before sending the bottle back to the cellar."

That's the greatest scene of Bunny Lake is Missing, Otto Preminger's 1965 thriller. And yes, that's the playwright Noël Coward being a drunken letch and coming on to Carol Lynley. Proof once again that the internet is a fantastical place, finding that this scene's already been posted online. The film also stars a brutally beautiful 29 year old Keir Dullea, three years before he would ask HAL to close the pod bay doors in 2001.


There are more pictures of Keir's loveliness at this link. But back to Bunny Lake - what a beautiful, boring movie! That sums up the mystery, which was pretty much obvious from the start, as well as Carol Lynley, who is just terrible. But Noël was a hoot in his couple of scenes and the film is really, really gorgeous to gaze upon. Preminger knows how to shoot a movie, I've always found his films beautiful, but I could barely make it through this one.


There's one scene that gooses the proceedings towards the end that's set in a decrepit basement filled with dolls that could've - should've - been really eerie but it's set to this light bouncy airy 60s music that's tremendously distracting and I couldn't really get the point of it. If the dissonance between the sound and the image was the point, it wasn't a good one. It was just frustrating.
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