Bunny Lake Is Missing

I was very sad to hear of the death of Carol Lynley last month. I have a special fondness for sex symbols of the 1960s, who I knew of as being very pretty but, in my days before adolescence, didn't quite exactly know why I was so attracted to them.

Probably her most notable role was in Otto Preminger's 1965 film Bunny Lake Is Missing, a psychological horror story that is very typical of both Preminger and the era. It was shot in black and white, with jarring music and quick cuts, and has an overall sensation of paranoia.

Lynley plays a young single American mother who has just arrived in London. Her brother (Keir Dullea) already lives there. She drops her daughter, Bunny, off at a nursery school, but when she goes to retrieve her she can't be found. The police, in the form of Laurence Olivier, investigate, but he starts to believe that Bunny may be a figment of Lynley's imagination.

Of course, we never see Bunny at the beginning of the film, so we have our doubts, too. There are stories about Lynley having an imaginary playmate when she was young, also called Bunny. And why are all of Bunny's things missing from her apartment?

Movies like this (another like this was Flightplan, with Jodie Foster) always get to me, as it's so easy for others to judge our sanity, and anything we say can be taken the wrong way. At one point Olivier asks her for a list of people who have seen Bunny since their arrival in England, and Lynley can't come up with one.

The film goes off the rails at the end, as the secret of the story is revealed, but until then Bunny Lake Is Missing is a taut, well-done thriller. Olivier, perhaps slumming a bit, shows his acting mastery by playing the detective as sympathetic but suspicious. Lynley, who was so beautiful, is more problematic. Her acting style is daytime drama, but then, how else would a woman whose child is missing act?