Critics reviews

As it becomes less certain that Bunny indeed exists, the mood of paranoia wrapping the film only tightens. Bunny Lake Is Missing becomes a delicious exercise in the tainting of innocence, featuring schoolyard songs that take on an eerie note, a lecherous landlord who flaunts a collection of African fertility masks and a whip once belonging to the Marquis de Sade, and the suggestion of incest which Preminger allows to hang over Ann and her brother Stevie...

Merciless as he is in putting his lead through the wringer, the director is no less implacable in his disdain for the social order that renders her vulnerable. A high-water mark for sordidness, even in a career spent practicing dispassionate sensationalism.

The movie screens twice this month, occasioned by two separate retrospectives: It plays Saturday at Film Forum as part of a tribute to Noël Coward, who adds toBunny Lake's panoply of perversities with an outré cameo; MoMA presents it on May 31 in the series "Modern Matinees: Fifteen by Otto Preminger." Two viewings in as many weeks still might not be enough to fully grasp the project's strangeness.

The mental chaos of the time is reflected in the behavior of the local solipsistic eccentrics (including a randy raconteur, played by Noël Coward), the nightmarish images, the backdrop of student protest and political crisis, and the frenzied soundtrack, which features the music of the Zombies.

The balanced suspense is what holds it together; Preminger's signature mix of controlled distance and frustrating rationality account for a tension that's lacking from most films of this sort nowadays... Even twenty years removed from his noir heyday, Preminger proved that the genre's essence is more than mere style.

This cycle [of best-seller adaptations] had largely run its course by 1965, when Preminger abruptly reverted to his earlier mode with the stylish, relatively frugal psychological thriller "Bunny Lake Is Missing." ...As steeped in pathology as it is, "Bunny" could make a kicky triple bill with two other mod thrillers, filmed in the mid-1960s by foreign visitors to Swinging London: Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up.

Obviously Preminger hunts about for best sellers and gimmicky projects to avoid paying the piper for box-office costs, but Bunny Lake Is Missing is a casting cheat even by Preminger's cut-corner standards. Laurence Olivier is scandalously wasted in a part any second-rate British character actor could have played with ease, and Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea are disconcertingly lightweight in heavyweight roles.