The largest complaint the film met with upon release was the revamping of the text, which frames the Victorian-era action at length through the memories of Lord Darlington (George Sanders) and Mrs. Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll), as old wheezers stumbling through the post-Blitz London ruins. The screenplay (co-authored by Dorothy Parker) does jettison a good deal of Wilde's wicked bon mot-laden text, presumably in the interest of narrative briskness and sentimentality (and long may we ponder a middle-century America where the common newspaper movie reviewers knew 19th-century Wilde plays well enough to notice or care about their abridgment). The story, in any case, does move much quicker - to the arrival of the younger and scandal-trailing Erlynne in London, where she quickly insinuates herself into the social circle around the Windermeres (Jeanne Crain and Richard Greene), for the purposes, it would seem, of seducing Lord Windermere. This situation provides Darlington in his prime the opportunity to swoop in and take advantage of Lady Windermere, for whom he cynically pines, but gossipy secrets are eventually made to reveal unexpected agendas, and the Windermere marriage, subject to so much jeopardy from without, emerges as the sole honest institution in a decadent societal landscape rife with proper-Brit sharks and hyenas.
Except not quite in Preminger's version. Otto was always scrupulous about his characters' moral relativism; in his filmography, no one is villainous, and people aren't destructive nearly as often as are the misunderstood circumstances that connect them. In that sense, Wilde's semi-comedy is premade for Preminger; its entire story arc is about peeling its characters' onions and discovering their real stories beneath the facades. The first surprise here, however, given the project's pedigree, is how little Wildean stuff we get to hear burble over Sanders' inimitable larynx. Unarguably something like Golden Age Hollywood's prototypical Wildean figure, Sanders also provided insouciant support and narration to the 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but that aside, the star's unique potential for maximizing Wilde's brand of acid-dried wit went largely unexplored. How a production of The Importance of Being Earnest was not mounted to capitalize on Sanders's peak years defies explanation.
Carroll, though, is a revelation - well past 40, and far from her bloom of icy youth well-remembered from The 39 Steps (1935) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), here is Carroll in her last full-fledged feature, near retiring but spry and confident and zesty, commanding the movie around the relatively inexperienced Crain, Greene and Hugh Dempster. Crain, for her part, gets to play a woman of self-possessed intelligence relatively early in her career, rather than the litany of spunky corn-fed maidens she was usually saddled with, and she is radiant.
But Premingerians will see beyond the people - to the ways in which the director orchestrates their movements and relationships in space, in order to create the story's tensions with visuals. A minute-and-a-half roving shot during the climactic ballroom sequence is a mini-masterpiece in limning complex dramatic situations, with at least eight major shifts between character perspectives, while an innocent scene in a shoe store is galvanized by the camera's investigative movements and multilayered planes of action. Preminger loved the unmanipulative two-shot, and usually resisted any shot or cut that emphasized "impact" - the better for us to consider the characters and their actions for ourselves. The movies of vital Hollywood auteurs like Preminger should be both watched and listened to with attention, yet woefully, in their day and now, viewers will lazily simply absorb the dialogue and acting, and consider the movie seen. Suffice it to say that most of the pre-1964 Preminger films could, and perhaps should, be seen twice, once with the sound turned off - in this case, what's left of Wilde's words would be completely lost, but Preminger's eloquence would be revealed, as an elemental factor of the art of cinema.
For all of that, The Fan is for the most part a quintessentially unpretentious studio factory product, a true auteur chestnut hidden beneath the veneer of standard postwar, mass-produced costume-drama entertainment, with its own emphasis on narrative drive, decor and star power. If movies, generally speaking, were in fact saved from assembly-line calcification and/or the onslaught of television in the '50s, it was the secret work of auteurs like Preminger that rescued them, and thereafter inspired the New Wave era that sustained global cinema artistically for decades. The Fan is that film - the forgotten sub-A-list Hollywood output, adapted from a classic and using stock sets on the Fox lot, which when you watch it now reveals an artist at work creating a complex human reality, expressing things with movement and perspective only movies can capture.
By Michael Atkinson
