The Bloom of a Quarter of a Century

 



Celebrated Exodus (1960) filmmaker and legendary asshole Otto Preminger returned to the subject of Israel for the second-to-last movie of his career, the comparatively obscure Rosebud (1975). Until recently, I had never heard of this study in international intrigue – and now I know why. Given what a plodding stinker this doldrum of Zio-tedium is, it might with more appropriateness have been titled Rosenbutt. Hanging in the air like an undying fart at a nigh-biblical 126 minutes, Preminger’s “action” and “adventure” story – if we are to accept IMDb’s labels – concerns a Palestinian terrorist organization’s abduction of some annoying rich girls and Newsweek journalist-spy Peter O’Toole’s debonair efforts to save them.

The Palestinian “animals”, the film eventually reveals, are being directed by fanatical British Islamic convert Richard Attenborough, whose “plans go much further than helping the Palestinians. This is the beginning of jihad.” The screenplay was written by Erik Lee Preminger, the director’s illegitimate son by stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and features such please-clap lines as this one placed in the mouth of spook O’Toole: “Haven’t you heard? Jews don’t walk into gas chambers anymore, they fight, and fight hard.” I was fighting to stay awake as my mind tended to wander for the duration of the film. Thankfully – and understandably – this was to be Erik Lee’s first and last script.

I hated almost everything about this movie from the beginning, starting with the fact that it expects me to take an interest in cosmopolitan types who pass their time on yachts and tennis courts. Smug and effeminate Peter O’Toole is particularly appalling as the languid and physically unimpressive hero. O’Toole, an alcoholic, was ailing during the shoot, but Rosebud still insists on treating the viewer to his shirtless Walter Brennan physique and having Isabelle Huppert pretend to be turned on by his attentions. A scene of him repeatedly slurping cream from a spoon is especially revolting. This movie’s idea of a suspenseful sequence is O’Toole patiently waiting around while a Jew digs a hole, fucks with some Arabs’ plumbing, and talks about toilets. “This was not the funnest set in the world to be on,” concedes film historian Daniel “The Rabbi” Kremer, whom Kino Lorber recruited to do the audio commentary for Rosebud’s recent DVD release.

“I think dismissing the film is facile and I just don’t think we should do that because […] there are many things in this film that I find quite fascinating,” Kremer states, insisting that Rosebud is not “the awful turkey that others [like me] have made it out to be” and adding that it has “aged rather interestingly”. Kremer, who claims to have found the film “jarring” when he first saw it in the wake of 9/11, finds it “strangely prescient” and sees in it Preminger’s revelation of “what he thought of the road ahead, where we were heading as a global community and the problems that were ahead of us.” Indeed, the cave-dwelling jihadist supervillain portrayed by Richard Attenborough prefigures the threat posed by Osama bin Laden’s “Al Qaeda” as it would be marketed to the American public as a pretext for the “War on Terror” – the stinky flower whose future bloom is predicted by the movie’s title.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.





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