There’s an allegedly cruddy-looking German Bluray available of Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal (’63), which I have no interest in seeing. The Cardinal was one of Preminger’s plodding auto-pilot films. But I’ve always loved Saul Bass‘s poster art. Bass presumably hated the rote, dreary sound of the title. How do you make a film called The Cardinal seem interesting or exciting? So Bass created a new film called THE Cardinal. I never want to see this alleged mediocrity (N.Y. Times critic Bosley Crowther wasn’t the only one to think so) which turned out to be a kind of simultaneous summit-and-death blow to Tom Tryon‘s career, but I’ll always love that big THE.
Tryon ‘s career peak before The Cardinal was either Disney’s Moon Pilot or I Married A Monster From Outer Space.
