During his career, Austrian-born director and actor Otto Preminger worked equally hard at his films and his public persona. With the years he created for himself the identity of the independent producer-director par excellence who refused to submit to the Big Studio system or to restrictive production codes and who could fire a star like Lana Turner, originally cast for Lee Remick's role in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), because she refused to wear the pair of trousers he had selected for her. The following statement is as typical of his persona as courtroom scenes are of his movies: "I say what I like because it is completely my picture, an independent picture. I am the producer, the director, the casting director, it's all my decision." This self-consciously iconoclastic and autocratic character endeared him in the 1950s and 1960s to the French critics and directors...