Claudio Carvalho
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.
Syl
Lord Laurence Olivier plays the detective in a missing child case. Carol Lynley plays Ann Lake, the mother, who does an excellent job especially towards the end of the film. Keir Dullea plays the strange Uncle Steven Lake. Sir Noel Coward has a small supporting role as the landlord. There are plenty of familiar British faces like Anna Massey, Martita Hunt, Clive Revill, and others in this film. The black and white does wonders in creating the mystery surrounding Bunny Lake. You wonder what the film is about and is stunned to learn the truth. It's a strange title but the film is actually first rate with all star cast. Carol Lynley does hold her own against powerhouse Olivier and against Dullea. I love the London locations on film. The film is a gem in British film history.
Jellybeansucker
It's film making, is what this odd little number, as some have called it, is really about. Great film making that could teach many how to do it. The use of black and white photography is delicious, which by the mid 60s had reached a really high art. There is a large clutch of really well shot black and white movies of the 50s and 60s which are all in competition with each other on the cinematography front, ranging from jazzy to arty to just plain classy, as BLIM is. This is a good example of Otto Prem's talent in the craft.Then the theme or subject, and this film's was of the latest trend of the day in psychological thrillers, missing children, with the obviously dark tone that comes with it. Very similar in tone and theme and time of release to Séance On A Wet Afternoon, BLIM provides a much better thriller experience, IMO and delivers just as much mystery.The cast has an ace in landing Lawrence Oilvier and of course it means class just oozes from the screen here. Olivier, the classy photography, the detached air of the narrative, the thoughtful screenplay, the trendy 60s London setting, and not least the Zombies soundtrack including a clever pub TV showing of them, means the film is as much art piece as thriller, but it does end in a proper thriller way in much darkness and its villain looks like Norman Bates' urbane cousin from uptown.So yes BLIM undoubtedly owes its soul to Psycho but it does do a great job of doing it all its own way. This is a very English, understated, classy little minor Psycho, if you like. I love it, it has credibility flaws if you want to be harsh on it, but the atmosphere it creates is top rate, as is the quietly classy style it has. Very of its time, and if you love anything to do with 60s London then add this one to your collection.
portaeporta
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.
AD
