Bauer became interested in cinema as a school boy, influenced by a Jewish girl, a piano player, who was hiding from Ustaše in his parents" home. Bauer became one of the most respected directors in Yugoslavia after his third film, the 1956 war thriller Don"t Look Back, My Son. Probably the best known of Bauer"s films is the 1963 feature Face to Face, a film which is considered to be the first Yugoslav political film.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Bauer was regarded as a master of Yugoslav cinema and commanded respect from the government and his colleagues alike. Although his films never questioned the regime, the dominant set of values in these films was described as "old-fashioned" and "bourgeois": instead of the usual glorification of youth and revolution his films often praised the decent, old, middle-class type of families. Bauer"s typical heroes made the right moral choices not inspired by ideology but driven by a sense of honor instead. However, by the late 1960s and 1970s Bauer was almost forgotten. In the late 1970s his works were rediscovered by young critics as a kind of a Yugoslav version of old Hollywood masters. Slovenian film historian Stojan Pelko wrote in the British Film Institute"s Encyclopedia of Russian and Eastern European Cinema that "Bauer was for Yugoslav critics what Hawks and Ford were for French New Wave critics". 

A substantial critical reevaluation of Bauer"s work took place since the mid-1980s. In a late 1990s critics" poll of all-time greatest Croatian film directors, Bauer took second place, behind Krešo Golik.