Ingo Preminger: To be younger brother to Otto Preminger, director of a dozen famous films, might have ensured a relatively obscure career for Ingo Preminger, who has died aged 95. Yet his one successful film, 1970's M*A*S*H*, outshone anything by Otto.
As a comedy it had an unpromising setting - a blood-spattered Korean War mobile army surgical hospital. Yet the antics of the surgeons and nurses provided the rich but caustic humour for a film that remains a Hollywood legend. It was adapted for a television series which lasted from 1972 to 1983, made Alan Alda a star, and turned Loretta Swit as "Hot Lips" Houlihan into a household name.
The director of M*A*S*H*, which was beaten by Patton to a best movie Oscar, was Robert Altman, who declared that the TV version lost the subversive humour of the film. This was probably true, but his Oscar loss was compensated with the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Golden Globe for best comedy.
Preminger's success with the film had also seemed unlikely. He was an agent without stars - his biggest name was fellow Austrian Paul Henreid - who had persevered with writers struck down by Hollywood's postwar purge of suspected subversives.
Preminger helped them sell their scripts under assumed names when they were blacklisted, as 320 were. One client was Ring Lardner, who had won a screenwriting Oscar in 1943 for Woman of the Year. In 1950 he received 10 months in prison for refusing to testify about his communist beliefs before the House Un-American Activities Committee three years earlier.
Lardner recommended that Preminger read a novel by a former Korean war surgeon from New Jersey. Preminger took it to Fox studio chief Darryl Zanuck. The fearsome Zanuck agreed to Ingo's condition that he produce the film if it was approved. The next day Zanuck phoned and shouted: "Sell your agency. You've got a third-floor office. We're making the movie."
Produced by Preminger on the cheap, with the Malibu Hills, near Los Angeles, substituting for Korea, and without big stars - Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould were the best known - M*A*S*H* was adored by critics and was an immense box-office success. Lardner, who had adapted the script, won an Oscar. Preminger made only two other known films, neither successful. The first was The Salzburg Connection (1972), with Anna Karina, about hidden Nazi documents. Next was The Great Smokey Roadblock (1976), about an ageing lorry driver (Henry Fonda) who steals back his repossessed vehicle for a last trip.
Preminger's modest place in Hollywood history would have been secure even without M*A*S*H*, because of his devotion to banned writers. Under borrowed names Lardner did well in Britain with the TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood; in Hollywood he scored with The Cincinatti Kid (1965), starring Edward G Robinson and Karl Malden. Another client was Dalton Trumbo, the novelist turned screenwriter nominated for an Oscar for Kitty Foyle in 1940, before also being jailed for defying the committee. Among Trumbo's blacklist successes were two Oscar films, Roman Holiday (1953), with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, and The Brave One (1956), about a boy and a bull.
Both Ingo and Otto were raised in the Austro-Hungarian empire in high style; their father Marckus was its chief prosecutor. They graduated as lawyers in Vienna, but the family's Jewish origins forced them to flee. They entered the US in 1938 with the help of the actor Tallulah Bankhead, who had powerful relatives in Washington. Otto died in 1986.
Ingwald "Ingo" Preminger, born February 25th, 1911; died June 7th, 2006