Bunny Lake is Missing

Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1966) It starts normally enough. Most nightmares do.

American Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), newly moved to London following with her brother Steven (Keir Dullea) who has moved for a prominent new job there, goes to pick up her daughter Bunny at the private school she's just enrolled her in. 

But, she can't find her. Nobody at the school remembers her, and can't recall seeing her. The teachers (including Anna Massey) are trying to deal with a crush of new kids starting off to school, so it's a little hard to pin-point the one individual child from the pack. But Ann is insistent, almost to the point of hysteria, and Steven is no help, poking around and questioning the odd woman (Martita Hunt) who lives above the school, berating the teachers and being oddly, vaguely threatening. Fearing a "bit of a row", the police are called in to investigate.

In walks Superintendant Newhouse (Sir Laurence Olivier) and his adjutant Williams (Clive Revill). Newhouse is a bit fusty, a might impatient, trying to understand a situation he doesn't quite fathom. He has an hysterical mother, a "helicoptering" brother, and a "missing person" that no one seems to have seen. It's all quite queer. He presses for details that seem to be there but no corroborating witnesses. He starts a line of inquiry that begins with a search of Steven and Ann's apartment.

When they get there, all traces of "Bunny Lake" are gone. No clothes, no toys, no dolls. Nothing. There isn't a sign that a child has ever lived there. Ever. Newhouse begins to suspect (as do we) that "Bunny Lake" is not only missing, but never existed in the first place. She may just be a figment of Ann's imagination, and the investigation changes from a "missing person" case to an investigation of Ann's psychological state. Steven volunteers that Ann had an imaginary friend as a child that was named "Bunny," and that steers Newhouse to try a different line of inquiry.

He takes Ann to a local pub where he begins an odd line of investigation. He asks Ann about "Bunny" and their history, hoping to liquor her up to find the truth. He learns that, while in the States, Ann had a boyfriend who got her pregnant and skipped out and Ann kept the baby, whom she called "Bunny." Steven was livid at the boyfriend's behavior and had even threatened him, but decided, instead, to get Ann out of that environment, taking a job in London and moving there with Ann and the child.

If the move had improved Steven's temper, it isn't noticeable when he storms into the pub and accuses Newhouse of trying to "railroad" his sister, and, instead of trying to find "Bunny," of trying to prove his sister is crazy. He warns the police to stay away from her...and him and do their jobs finding the missing child. Newhouse demurs, but he widens the search to find out what he can about the Lakes...all of them. 

Meanwhile, for the audience, the list of possibilities grows with every scene. That crazy old lady in the school's attic apartment doesn't seem the most stable of people, the cook who took charge of "Bunny" in the morning goes missing as well. Then, there's the actor-neighbor of the Lakes (Noel Coward), who can only be described as "pan-sexual," making a pass at Ann when they're alone. Maybe there is a "Bunny Lake," given all the potential suspects that would be handy to commit the crime. Maybe there isn't. And maybe Ann is being "gas-lit," led down a particular path to drive her crazy.

Adapted by John Mortimer (he created "Rumpole of the Bailey") and his wife Penelope (The Pumpkin Eater)—with a reported assist from Ira Levin—from a novel by Marryamm Modell, Bunny Lake is Missing is directed by Otto Preminger, a director who vacillated between prestige projects and controversial ones, to the point where one wondered whether he favored making good movies or headlines. But, he rarely played it safe, except in matters of budget. Here, he combines the genres of noir (with which he was all too familiar, having directed one of the classic ones, Laura) and the psychological drama, which Hitchcock had exploited successfully before and who had reached the box-office apex with Psycho.

Since 1960, Preminger had produced and directed big budget blockbusters with novel credibility—Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, Exodus, and In Harm's Way. With Bunny Lake... there was budgetary down-sizing, so that less money was at stake, but Preminger's reputation was such that he could still get actors like Olivier and Coward, even if the film was small in scope and less than seemly in content. He changed the book's location from New York to London (probably for budget reasons, but also to benefit from an unfamiliar British cast and enhancing the disorientation of the "Ann" character). And somewhere along the way, they also changed the ending of the book to lend an extra element of surprise. 

Preminger favored long "takes," getting the most mileage out of his actors and his shooting day, editing being dictated by how things went on stage—nothing fancy. Preminger, who favored black and white for cinematography whenever he could, filled the screen with rich areas of darkness, learned from his early noir's.
Bunny Lake is engaging, fairly engrossing for most of its length with odd curiosities along the way. That it doesn't quite fulfill the promise of maintaining it might be a bit in the playing of it, rather than in the preparation.