Deconstructing Daisy Clover

Hollywood loves making films about Hollywood; but very rarely do they do it well.

What can I say about this film I have seen at least a dozen times (and own a copy of in my DVD collection) but really, really don’t like?  I guess I would file this one under ‘Bad Movies I Love,’ or more accurately, ‘Bad Movies Starring Actors I Love.’

Inside Daisy Clover (1965) features some of my all-time favorite stars at the height of their fame, beauty and talent: The radiant Natalie Wood, a dreamy Robert Redford, the brilliant Christopher Plummer, Ruth Gordon and Roddy McDowall. Too bad the film takes advantage of so few of its potential assets and delivers less than stellar entertainment.

It’s directed by Robert Mulligan  (To Kill A Mockingbird) who had directed Wood in her moving Oscar-nominated performance in Love With the Proper Stranger opposite Steve McQueen, so it’s only natural they’d want to work together again. But instead of another gritty slice of life, they picked this glossy, overblown melodrama for their next project.

America's Sweetheart: Natalie Wood in the title role

Set in the 1930s, the film has absolutely no sense of period. It has that slick, anachronistic mid-1960s Panavision feel, much like Harlow, made the same year. A few marcelled hairstyles on the extras and period roadsters in the background are about the only nods to any specific place and time. (Can’t compare to the authenticity of a Bonnie and Clyde or a Paper Moon.)

In the film, Daisy Clover, played by Natalie, is being built up as the latest Depression Era child star—presumably the next Shirley Temple or Judy Garland. Yet the over-the-top metallic pixie elf costume she wears in her debut film is pure ‘60s mod (shame on you, Edith Head); Miss Wood even tosses a bit of psychedelic frugging into Herb Ross’s choreography in the  “You’re Gonna Hear from Me” sequence—and that the scene is filmed in black and white does not lend a shred of authenticity.

At 27, Natalie Wood was a bit long in the tooth to be portraying the 15-year old tomboy who shoots to stardom but those who know something about her life can understand why she was attracted to the role.

The story of Daisy Clover, adapted by screenwriter and film historian Gavin Lambert from his 1963 novel, held personal significance for Wood. A former child star herself, Natalie had some heavy baggage of her own. Her embattled past had included a disfiguring injury on the set of an early film; reportedly being raped by a he-man superstar as a child; affairs with a director and a legendary male crooner (both old enough to be her father) while still underage; adultery, divorce, suicide attempts and all the tabloid soap opera that seems to go hand-in-hand with glamour and fame.

Natalie Wood shined as both child and adult actress; at the tender age of 9 she was remarkable in Miracle on 34th Street, and as a teenager earned her first Oscar nomination (for Best Supporting Actress) in Rebel Without a Cause. Perhaps her finest hour on screen is her heartbreaking performance as Deenie in Splendor in the Grass opposite her soon-to-be lover Warren Beatty.

By sheer force of personality, Wood is able to breathe believability into the troubled young woman she portrays in Daisy Clover, conveying the complexities of a character who is tough on the outside but fragile on the inside, despite the fact that her role is severely underwritten. That in the movie Daisy is finally able to exorcise her demons and exact revenge in the film’s fiery climax may have been satisfying for Wood, but less so for mystified audiences trying to follow the threadbare plot. 

Sorry, Natalie, Miss Show Business you're not

It’s a hackneyed rags-to-riches anti-Cinderella tale. Sporting the same boy haircut/wig as she did as Louise in Gypsy, tomboy/urchin/gamine Natalie smokes moodily and scrawls lame graffiti on the walls of the crumbling Angel Beach boardwalk before sending her demo record to Hollywood. A miracle occurs—she’s whisked away to La La Land, screen-tested and molded by the studio head into the biggest star in the business. Daisy’s demented mother is put away in a sanitorium so Daisy can be a workhorse and money machine. Daisy falls in love with bad boy Wade Lewis but he ditches her on their honeymoon. Daisy’s mother dies. Daisy has a breakdown. And so on...fill in the cliché.

But perhaps the biggest mistake of Inside Daisy Clover was to make it a quasi-musical instead of a straight drama.

Other than “You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” which is actually quite lovely (when performed by a fine singer!), the songs by Andre Previn and his then-wife Dory Previn, who also provided the musical interludes of Valley of the Dolls, have an ersatz feel and lack of substance. But worse, the great, powerful talent as described in Lambert’s script– which makes you think of a little girl with a big voice like Judy Garland–is sadly not embodied in Natalie Wood’s Daisy Clover.

It’s supposed to be magic when dirty-faced urchin Daisy opens her mouth to sing. But it just isn’t. Dubbed by the brassy but otherwise unmemorable voice of Jackie Ward, Natalie mimes like a trouper and passably executes the energetic choreography of Herbert Ross (who also staged Funny Girl for stage and film), but no matter how much Hollywood wants us to believe it, Natalie Wood is simply not a singer or musical star.

(Why did they force this lovely young actress into so many musicals? Wood’s singing voice in West Side Story had been famously dubbed by Marni Nixon. Natalie did do her own singing in Gypsy, but the result was not pretty, her untrained voice a little too loud and slightly off-key. Here, she merely gives another competent lip-sync job. )

Stick to the drama, Daisy, you're much better at that!

To her credit, Wood does have a few great moments in this so-so film. The sequence when Daisy is plagued by interruptions as she attempts suicide (by putting her head in a gas oven) is darkly comedic and brilliantly played. And the unforgettable scene where Daisy has a nervous breakdown while looping the Previns’ bizarre Circus number is truly terrifying, raw and real. (No wonder that Hollywood princess Carrie Fisher would pay homage to this iconic scene in her own show business opus, Postcards from the Edge, nearly 30 years later.)

For Daisy Clover, Natalie Wood was surrounded with a cast of talented heavyweights, many of them dear friends in her real life, so I do hope they all had a better time making it than audiences had seeing it. (Not that many did; it was a critical and box office flop.)

Mystery Man: Robert Redford as Wade Lewis, aka Lewis Wade

Gay subtext: Roddy McDowall as Walter Baines (wait, did he also handle Wade?)

Poor Roddy McDowall is forced to essay another thankless role here, one of many in his long career. He has about six lines of dialogue total as the Swan Studio head’s supercilious (read gay) henchman and Daisy’s watchful handler Walter Baines. (Thank goodness Mr. McDowall was able to carve out a piece of immortality for himself with the wildly popular Planet of the Apes series a few years later.)

A lifelong friend of Wood’s (he too had been a child star, along with their mutual close friend Elizabeth Taylor), McDowall was also an obsessive documentarian. The year that Daisy Clover was made, McDowall shot hours and hours of footage of Wood and a galaxy of stars who visited his Malibu beach house– including Lauren Bacall, Tony Perkins, Judy Garland, Jane Fonda and Christopher Plummer. (These home movies are more fun to watch than this film.)

The Dealer: Ruth Gordon as Lucile Clover

Returning to the screen after a 20-year absence is Ruth Gordon as Daisy’s eccentric mother, aka The Dealer. One of the great character actors of all time (as well as the brilliant co-writer of classic films like Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike with her husband Garson Kanin), Gordon is given precious little to do here; she speaks not a word of dialogue for 3/4 of the picture, so we’re prevented from enjoying much of her famously sardonic delivery. But the Academy did award Gordon with a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, which opened the door to a new career and paved the way for her iconic Oscar-winning performance as Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. Gordon’s wisecracking old lady persona became her stock in trade for a very successful third act—in films from Harold & Maude to Every Which Way But Loose and My Bodyguard, she was the 1970s version of Betty White.

 With a face made for the silver screen, Robert Redford proves himself the quintessential male movie star—he positively glows with gorgeous golden boy vitality as the insouciant maverick film star Wade Lewis. This is Redford’s first major film role, after hitting the big time on the Broadway stage with Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (he would star with Jane Fonda in the film version two years later).

Unfortunately, Redford and his publicity team insisted that Lambert downplay his character’s bisexuality (it’s barely even alluded to in the finished film), further diluting the film’s already thin plotline. Thus it’s a mystery why Wade keeps disappearing and abandoning Daisy to the Tinseltown wolves. Nevertheless, Redford and Wood display real onscreen chemistry in their scenes together here, better served the next year when they costarred again for This Property Is Condemned.

Daisy’s producer, Alan J. Pakula, would go on to become Redford’s producing partner, where their greatest film triumph would come a decade later with All the President’s Men.

The two actors who fare best in this basically unsatisfying film are Christopher Plummer as studio head Raymond Swan and Katharine Bard as his deceptively sweet wife Melora. Bard skillfully plays good cop to her hard-nosed husband’s bad cop, gaining Daisy’s trust, but shows her true colors and her own baser instincts in a wild drunk scene in which she reveals the dirty secret of Wade’s sexuality. (Other than an unimpressive resume of TV guest shots, including a couple of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, this is Bard’s most notable role, and she is memorable.)

Katharine Bard as Melora Swan, sporting some flamboyant Edith Head-gear

As the avaricious impresario who wants to exploit, cash in on and ultimately own Daisy Clover, even taking the teen to his bed to exert total control over her, Christopher Plummer goes to the dark side and practically steals the film. Nicknamed The Prince of Darkness by Wade Lewis, Plummer’s Raymond Swan is handsome enough to be a leading man himself. He is simultaneously sexy and sadistic, charming and revolting. The unsettling scene where he takes Daisy into his arms to comfort her and ends up kissing her passionately is quite startling, even by today’s standards.

Prince of Darkness: Christopher Plummer as Raymond Swan

It’s obvious Plummer relishes his role and he plays it to the hilt. (Frankly, I always preferred Plummer’s stern and scary Captain Von Trapp in the early sequences of Sound of Music, before he transforms into the moist-eyed, guitar-wielding, “Edelweiss”-singing Father of the Year. And so, apparently, did he: Plummer always jokingly referred to his most iconic film as The Sound of Mucus.)  Fifteen years later, Plummer would play a similar Svengali-like role as Jane Seymour’s producer/lover in Somewhere in Time.

After Daisy Clover, Natalie Wood would go on to enjoy less success than her colleagues on this film...it seems her salad days as a film icon were already over. True, she would costar in the hip sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969, but her credits after that are far from memorable. But, she would be the first to say in her own defense, she found a far more rewarding career as a doting mother raising a houseful of kids, first with second husband Richard Gregson and then after remarrying ex-husband Robert Wagner.

Cute couple: Their chemistry is undeniable.

An unsatisfying mélange of hoary showbiz cliches, Inside Daisy Clover is for the most part lugubrious, gloomy and depressing, enlivened by the fleeting moments of camp provided by a couple of rather ludicrous musical numbers, and the strong performances of a seasoned company of actors. Is it melodrama or satire? I still don’t know. The mood in each scene swings between these polarities. But it’s also an opportunity to see some of my favorite actors working in what, regrettably, is not one of my favorite films.

 And yes, I’ll definitely be watching it again one of these days. I can’t resist.

This is an entry in the Charismatic Christopher Plummer Blogathon, hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews and Pale Writer. I look forward to reading all about this acclaimed actor's greatest roles in the days to come. 

Roman's Baby

I was an avid reader from an early age, always raiding my parents’ bookshelf for material that was usually a bit above my head. My favorites, though, were my dad’s horror and suspense titles—Harvest Home by Tom Tryon, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and, best of all, the amazing Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, a novel that was so cleverly and cinematically written that it played like a film in my head as I read it.

When, several years later, I got the chance to see the movie, I was amazed and delighted that the film followed the book faithfully, scene by scene, beat by beat, practically even line by line of dialogue. Director Roman Polanski had wisely followed Levin’s tightly written book to the letter; Rosemary’s Baby (1968) remains the most faithful film adaptation of a popular novel.

It’s also one of my all-time favorite movies, one that I can watch over and over and find new things to admire about it. (The beautiful Criterion Collection blu-ray edition I own allows me to do just that.) Best of all, Rosemary turned me on to the talents of one of the cinema’s most groundbreaking and controversial directors.

The best-selling novel by Ira Levin was not the author’s first to be adapted into a film--A Kiss Before Dying was first. (The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Deathtrap and Sliver were to follow, with varying degrees of success, but none approached the cache of the Polanski film.) Levin’s themes, delving into urban paranoia, conspiracy and the nature of evil in contemporary society, were perfect in a post-JFK-assassination America. (The Time magazine  asking “Is God Dead?” that Rosemary reads in the doctor’s office says it all.)

When wunderkind producer Robert Evans, newly minted head of Paramount Pictures (a former actor far handsomer than many of his stars) green-lighted the project, the novel had been optioned by horror schlockmeister William Castle (The Tingler, Strait-Jacket, I Saw What You Did), but Evans was determined not to allow Castle to direct. (Castle would receive a producer credit and a cameo appearance as the menacing man outside the phone booth in Rosemary’s claustrophobic telephone scene.) Instead, Evans chose an exciting new talent to helm the project.

Star Farrow confers with producer Evans and director Polanski

Rosemary is the perfect introduction to the artistry of director Roman Polanski—it may in fact be the auteur’s masterwork. It was Polanski’s first American production, after wowing European audiences with his innovative thrillers Knife in the Water (produced in his native Poland and Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film of 1964) and Repulsion (made in France in 1965). Polanski was fast garnering a reputation for bold, raw realism, taking the “New Wave” cinema of the 1960s to the next level.

Together, Evans and Polanski assembled a talented creative team to tell this absorbing story of a young woman expecting her first child, and the strange circumstances surrounding her pregnancy. 

This may be the ultimate “victim movie;” the character of Rosemary is duped, drugged, raped, lied to and controlled by a sinister devil-worshiping cabal that includes her own husband. (Ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse treats his young wife like chattel, a bargaining chip to put on the table, selling his soul—and his wife’s—to achieve stardom.) It’s also the ultimate conspiracy film as well, because not until the final scene do we know for sure that Rosemary’s worries and concerns are not mere paranoid delusions. Oh, yes, and evil seems to triumph in the end.

The character of Rosemary offers a conflicted view of womanhood. On one hand, she embodies weakness, pain and suffering. On the other, she listens to her own intuition and  relentlessly pursues the truth about her situation. Ultimately, although she is confronted with the ultimate evil, her maternal instincts kick in and she finds herself adapting to a “new normal.”

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse

Polanski seriously considered his wife Sharon Tate for the role of Rosemary; indeed, she did have a quality very similar to Catherine Deneuve, the beleaguered heroine of his previous psychological thriller Repulsion; but Paramount wanted at least one bankable name in the cast. Mia Farrow starred on the wildly popular nighttime soap opera Peyton Place, and won the role after Tuesday Weld reportedly turned it down.

As Rosemary Woodhouse, Mia Farrow is delicate, waif-like and reed-thin, and the famous Vidal Sassoon pixie cut makes her appear even more vulnerable, a sharp contrast from her Sydney Guilaroff wigs (favored by Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day and Kim Novak) in the early sequences. Mia Farrow iconically embodies the title character, imbuing her with warmth and humanity. Farrow deserved a Best Actress Oscar for creating one of the most iconic damsels in distress in cinema history, but incredibly, she was not even nominated. She did win Italy’s David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress and was nominated for Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards for her luminous and fragile—yet determined—Rosemary.

Farrow sacrificed her marriage to Frank Sinatra to finish filming Rosemary. Sinatra had signed his young wife to costar opposite him in The Detective, but by the film’s appointed start date, the Polanski film was far from finished. Polanski’s painstaking attention to detail and elaborate setups slowed the creative process and put the picture weeks behind schedule, which infuriated Sinatra. He served his wife of nine months divorce papers right on the Rosemary set.

John Cassavetes as Guy Woodhouse

Polanski was inspired in his against-type casting of John Cassavetes in the role of Guy Woodhouse; an auteur himself, Cassavetes epitomizes the hungry ambition of the New York “actor type.” Originally the role was planned for Robert Redford...but if he had gone through with it, Polanski would have run the risk of turning his suspense thriller into Barefoot at the Bramford…with Mia in her sunny Doris Day-like outfits with golden boy Redford by her side. (Later Redford would star opposite Farrow in the unfortunate 1974 version of The Great Gatsby.) Instead, the dark, inscrutable Cassavetes (sexy without being handsome) with his curious Method delivery and his shifty eyes, adds a menacing air right from the start.

Making the villanous Satan-worshiping cabal a seemingly kindly group of senior citizens was an Ira Levin stroke of genius, and those supporting roles were cast just as brilliantly by Polanski, with old-time character actors like Patsy Kelly (Pigskin Parade), Ralph Bellamy (His Girl Friday) and Elisha Cook (The Maltese Falcon). Sidney Blackmer (who played Grace Kelly’s dad in High Society) is eccentric and bombastic as Roman Castevet, martyr to his father’s old religion.

Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet

As Roman’s dotty wife Minnie, showbiz veteran Ruth Gordon all but steals the show, earning her a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 71. A multitalented actress and writer, Gordon was the wife of Garson Kanin, with whom she coauthored such classic films as A Double Life, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike.

Gordon’s quirky character role as Natalie Wood’s demented mother in Inside Daisy Clover had reignited her acting career, and thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, she went on to enjoy the most successful third act in all of show business (save perhaps for Betty White), working steadily through the 1970s in classics including Harold and Maude, Where’s Poppa? and My Bodyguard. Her last film was Maxie with Glenn Close in 1985, the year she died. In 1977, Gordon briefly reprised her role as Minnie Castevet in the poor TV movie sequel Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby. Perhaps it would have been more palatable had Minnie’s role been bigger!

Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet

Director Polanski begins his storytelling at a leisurely pace, letting the tension build slowly but surely with a heightened form of naturalism, as newlyweds Guy and Rosemary rent a four-room apartment in a grand and charming old apartment house with a sinister history, as they are warned by their elderly friend Hutch. The film is punctuated with a strain of black humor throughout, mostly in the character of Minnie Castevet but also through Guy (“I think I hear the Trench Sisters chewing”) and Maurice Evans’s Hutch (“I see you had another suicide over there at Happy House”), among others.

The Woodhouses tour the Bramford apartment with Mr. Miklas (Elisha Cook, Jr.)

An important character in the film is the gothic apartment house itself, the “Black Bramford.” The filming location, of course, is the infamous Dakota on Central Park West, scene of tragedy a dozen years later when John Lennon was shot and killed in front of the building where he lived.

Production designer Paul Sylbert, aided by his talented daughter costume designer (and later producer) Anthea Sylbert, creates a palette of bright Technicolor to contrast with the darkness of the tale—lemon yellows, rose reds and wild prints. Rosemary’s penchant for yellow-and-white wallpaper described in the book is brought to life here and used as a backdrop for the weird dreams and goings-on in the bedroom scenes. Anthea Sylbert captures the late 1960s zeitgeist in Rosemary’s breezy dresses (including some very chic maternity ensembles), the avant garde outfits of the young friends at Rosemary’s party.  and even the colorfully zany pinks-and-reds of the Castevets, oldies trying to seem hip and vibrant and “with it.”

A scuffed-up Rosemary in her lemon yellow bedroom

Polanski seemed galvanized by every aspect of the story, both grandiose and mundane, and his obsessively detailed and choreographed camera compositions make this a cinema experience like no other. Some of my favorite Polanski moments here include seeing a distorted Rosemary’s bloody lips and fingers reflected in the toaster as she gnaws on raw chicken livers (her kid will not grow up a vegan); and Rosemary using her butcher knife to stop the baby’s bassinet from rocking and give her away as she readies herself for a climactic confrontation with evil.

"Oh, no, don't change the program on my account..."

The director excels in conceptualizing the novel’s unusual dream sequences, which when reading seem impossible to convey on film. These include Minnie Castevet’s voiceover on a scene with nuns in a Catholic school, and the drug-induced yacht sequence replete with weird cameo appearances by lookalikes for Pope Paul, Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, which segues into the nude ritual in which Rosemary is impregnated by “someone inhuman.” “This is no dream, this is really happening!”

Polanski’s choice of composer is another feather in his cap as a master of suspense. Christopher Komeda’s innovative use of music conveys the underlying tension and anxiety, from the repetitive piano tinklings of “Fur Elise” to the atonal cacophony of jazz as Rosemary flees from Guy and Sapirstein upstairs to her apartment. Komeda even composed a memorable theme for Rosemary’s mysterious pregnancy pain, described by Levin in the book as “a wire around me getting tighter and tighter.”

Mrs. Gilmore (Hope Summers) and Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy)

 Is this a horror film? In some ways, yes, but far from a conventional one. Though the supernatural element is downplayed in favor of gnawing tension and paranoia—is Rosemary imagining it all?—we must remember that the Castevets’ satanic magic actually works. Guy wins the star-making stage role he had previously lost to Donald Baumgart after his enlightening after-dinner conversation with Roman—Baumgart suddenly goes blind. (The tense telephone scene between Rosemary and an unseen Baumgurt later in the film is chilling—thanks partially to the inimitable voiceover performance of Tony Curtis, who just happened to be a visitor to the set that day!)  And Hutch goes into a coma before he has time to warn Rosemary about all of those witches, directly after meeting Castevet. And of course, in the iconic final scene when Rosemary sees her baby open its eyes for the first time, she knows that Guy Woodhouse is definitely not the father.

Dark humor alert: Rosemary, Roman and Laura-Louise (Patsy Kelly)

Rosemary’s Baby made Roman Polanski an international filmmaking superstar. Though not nominated for Best Director by the Academy that year (he should have been!), Polanski did earn a well-deserved Oscar nod for Best Adapted Screenplay of the Levin novel. 

The controversial Polanski has manifested even more drama in his life than in his work. Less than a year after Rosemary’s success, he endured a horrific real-life tragedy when wife Sharon Tate, pregnant with their child, was brutally murdered in their L.A. home, becoming the most famous victim of the gruesome “Manson family” murders.

Roman Polanski

Several years later, Polanski was convicted of raping a teenage girl at the home of Jack Nicholson. The director fled the U.S. to avoid a prison sentence, and has not been permitted to set foot in the United States since. He has been married to French actress Emmanuelle Seigneur since 1989.

The prolific Polanski has enjoyed many career high points since Rosemary’s Baby, most notably 1974’s Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway and 2002’s The Pianist, which finally earned him the Best Director Academy Award. My personal favorite Polanski films include Frantic with Harrison Ford and soon-to-be-wife Seigneur, The Ghost Writer with Ewan McGregor, and the auteur’s return to the occult devil-worship oeuvre with 1999’s The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp, with Seigneur as a seductive female Satan.

My all-time-favorite blogpost about this all-time-favorite film can be found over at the divine Le Cinema Dreams movie-lover's mecca.

Thanks so much to my friend Quiggy at the Midnite Drive-In and Phyllis Loves Classic Movies for hosting the Favorite Director Blogathon!