Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

It’s a Carol Lynley Double Bill on Luke Honey’s WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups. First up is Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Otto Preminger’s stylish, psychological thriller set in London, with a witty script by John and Penelope Mortimer. Lynley stars as a young American mother newly arrived in London. Laurence Olivier is a world-weary Scotland Yard Superintendent, and Noël Coward almost steals the show as an amusingly creepy landlord. And then on Sunday, we’ll return with The Shuttered Room (1967). Set on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts, Carol inherits a dilapidated water mill and makes her acquaintance with the locals — including witchy Flora Robson and a simian Oliver Reed: H. P. Lovecraft meets Deliverance (1972)…

Here’s another old favourite I hadn’t seen since the late 1980s. Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). But would it live up to expectations? After all those years? Little Bunny Lake does indeed go missing — from the Little People’s Garden School, a swanky 1960s kindergarten staffed by starchy, wasp-waisted Anna Massey and Adrienne Corri. In Hampstead. And Carol Lynley plays Bunny’s independent American mother, Ann: a Yummy Mummy who happens to be unmarried — which of course, back in 1965, would have been far more of a big deal than today, or, at the very least, might have set Mary Whitehouse and the good burghers of Rustington-on-Sea all a-tutter. Ann’s got the most appealing, breathy little lost-girl accent, like Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe.

There’s also an amusing trailer, introduced by Otto Preminger himself, which hints that even The Zombies (the British rock band, St Albans’s finest) may be responsible for Bunny’s mysterious disappearance:

The strange thing is that I only had vague memories of Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). I remembered that it was set in Hampstead — which made sense, as I used to live just around the corner in Flask Walk, where much of it was filmed — and that it had been shot in grainy black and white. But it’s funny how the mind plays tricks, fusing two or three films into one. For some strange reason, I had confused it in my befuddled brain with Kaleidoscope (1966), the Technicolour caper starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York, which, although set partly in Swinging London’s Hampstead, is a very different kettle of fish.

Detective Sergeant Andrews (referring to Noël Coward’s creepy landlord): Bloody pervert if you want my opinion, Sir. Kept on asking Rogers to strike him.

Superintendent Newhouse: Please Andrews, he works for the BBC.

Otto Preminger based his film on Meriam Modell’s novel, Bunny Lake Is Missing (1957), but with John and Penelope Mortimer’s script relocating the action to London, as opposed to New York, and adding the obnoxious Steve (Keir Dullea) to the story, Ann’s over-protective brat of a newspaperman brother. And two things immediately struck me. One: how films of the 1960s and 1970s are obsessed with kindergartens and children’s parties: uniformed nannies, sexy Swedish au pairs, radioactive jellies, Cadbury’s chocolate fingers and those feathered, curled paper blower things, which, thinking about it, has to have something to do with the Baby Boomer generation of 1946-1964, and the affluence which came with it. And immediately springing to mind are: The Nanny (1965), Interlude (1968), The Omen (1976) — when nanny Billie Whitelaw leaps from an upstairs window in the middle of the kiddywink’s tea party — and one of the better episodes from the Hammer House of Horror television anthology, The House That Bled to Death (1980), when a rusty pipe sprays South Kensington gore all over a sproglet’s birthday bash. It’s all deeply amusing.

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