ORDINARY PEOPLE 1980

"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  - Tolstoy

Ordinary People won the 1981 Best Picture Oscar against Raging Bull, The Elephant Man, Tess, and Coal Miner's Daughter. While hindsight and time have confirmed my personal opinion that Martin Scorsese’s searing and ambitious Raging Bull was the more deserving prize recipient that year, I must assert that in saying this, I am in no way diminishing or discounting the brilliance that is Ordinary People. It's an easy film to dramatically discredit due to its essentially conventional structure and familiar domestic themes. And it's an easy film to creatively overlook because it lacks both the cinematic bravura and operatic scope of Scorsese’s masterpiece. But, when leaving these comparisons aside, director Robert Redford's Ordinary People has always struck me as one of the most emotionally eloquent and evocative domestic dramas I've ever seen.

The passion of Scorsese's beautifully rendered biographical character study may move me aesthetically, and I'm aware that part of me responds most strongly to it (as I do with Stanley Kubrick's films) on a largely cerebral level--I'm just so impressed with its filmmaking craft. But to this day, of all the movies nominated that year, I still find Ordinary People to be the most deeply affecting of the lot. Its poignance speaks to me in ways that perhaps have little to do with art, but everything to do with its compassionate point of view and my enduring fondness for motion pictures that explore the human condition.

As the years go by, I come to appreciate Ordinary People’s simple, straightforward approach more and more, for its look feels less like the absence of style in a first-time director than a deliberate attempt on Redford’s part to use the film's crisp, conventional look as a commentary on the role conformity and the illusion of appearances play in the world these people inhabit. A means of training the focus on what’s most important to the story: repression and the inability of its characters to understand and express feelings that fall beyond the scope of coping mechanisms of structure, order, and self-control.

Mary Tyler Moore as Beth Jarrett

Donald Sutherland as Calvin Jarrett

Timothy Hutton as Conrad Jarrett

Judd Hirsch as Dr. Tyrone C. Berger

Elizabeth McGovern as Jeannine Pratt

Dinah Manoff as Karen Alrich

Ordinary People tells the story of the Jarretts, an upper-middle-class family living in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, an affluent neighborhood of spacious homes, manicured lawns, and people skilled in the art of emotional repression. Fittingly, the film opens with a montage of tranquil, postcard-perfect images of this tony residential community, for in this beige-colored, WASP enclave, appearances seem to do all the talking. Most vociferously, these meticulously kept-up appearances speak of status and wealth, but they're also an avowal of the belief that if everything looks right, it must then certainly be right.
From order comes security, and security must, therefore, bring happiness. The unexpected is kept at bay. Everyone is safe. Lives are happy. All is as it should be, and there is no mess—except for in the Jarrett household, where, bit by bit, their lives are slowly coming apart.

Keeping Up Appearances

Looking at them from the outside, one would assume the Jarretts haven’t a problem in the world. Genial, easygoing Calvin is a successful tax attorney; elegant, poised Beth, a mother and housewife, is an avid golfer and paragon of perfectionism; and 17-year-old Conrad…he’s just been released from a mental hospital after having tried to kill himself.

You see, Buck Jarrett, eldest son, star athlete, and all-around Golden Boy, drowned in a boating accident a little over a year ago, and the emotional fallout of the tragedy (or more precisely, the lack of it) has left a huge fissure in the Jarrett’s façade of have-it-all normalcy.
The loss of the older brother he looked up to causes Conrad to suffer a nervous breakdown born of survivor's guilt and from the feeling that, in the eyes of his parents, he'll never measure up enough to compensate for the void. Beth, who one senses blames Conrad for his brother’s death, has virtually shut him out of her life. Unable to display affection and withholding approval, she thinks that Conrad’s suicide attempt was a deliberate act of revenge directed at her (the deed left the image-conscious Beth having to weather both the stigma of having an institutionalized son and the humiliation of others knowing that all is far from orderly in the Jarrett household).

Calvin, stuck in the role of conciliator, drinks a bit too much and tends to turn a blind eye to what he perhaps knows/fears to be true between Beth and Conrad. In his earnest efforts to make everything nice, he too, lives in a state of denial about his feelings.

Recovering from shock therapy, left behind a grade for his months-long stay at a mental hospital,
Conrad feels the pressure of others wanting things to return to "normal" as quickly as possible

In chronicling Conrad’s journey toward forgiveness (himself and his mother) Ordinary People’s look at the dysfunction within a by-all-appearances functional family covers little of what I’d call new ground. Certainly not after all those ’60 post-Graduate films eviscerating the middle class for their false values, the wave of Vietnam-era ‘70s films and TV movies devoted to cultural soul-searching, or the 1973 PBS documentary An American Family (television's first reality show), which regaled us with the spectacle of the disintegration of a quintessential WASP family from the comfort of our living rooms.

But where Robert Redford succeeds in making Ordinary People an uncommonly perceptive look at a familiar topic is how his direction displays an insider's insight into this world and the people who inhabit it. There are none of the cliché, easy-target jibes at the upper-middle-class typical of the "domestic disintegration" genre. In its place is an intimate familiarity with the WASP rituals of suppression (few interactions occur outside of the formalized: meals, cocktail parties, golf games, and "keeping busy" are the cure-all panacea), empathy for the adult characters, and compassion for the adolescents.

The "French Toast scene" is one of my favorites. It features a father who tries too hard, a son who feels too much, and a mother who expresses her feelings in the only way she knows how: through the dutiful carrying out of household rituals. The tension is as thick as maple syrup.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Ordinary People was a critical and commercial success upon release, its few detractors mostly citing it as perhaps a little too ordinary in its approach for its own good. A solemn, pedigreed, adult drama about important issues, Ordinary People is the kind of film studios once touted as a “prestige picture,” and critics would label “Oscar bait” (Indeed, it was nominated for six Oscars, winning four: Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay.)

Almost too refined and tasteful for the messiness of its subject matter, Ordinary People’s family-in-crisis themes, relaxed, naturalistic performances, and distinct lack of showy, cinematic tricks (a welcome rarity from a first-time director) still have many feeling that Redford’s film is little more than a superior movie-of-the-week. 

But to me, what Ordinary People lacks in visual distinction (not entirely fair, John Bailey’s cinematography, evoking the chill and melancholy beauty of autumn in the Midwest, is remarkably expressive), it makes up for in keeping the viewer emotionally rapt in the Jarretts' domestic free-fall. Ordinary People’s greatest strength has always been its characters, the tenuous structure of their relationships, and the depth of emotional authenticity the film’s remarkable cast brings to Alvin Sargent’s splendid screenplay (from Judith Guest’s 1976 novel).

The entire cast of Ordinary People is extraordinary, but Mary Tyler Moore wasn't fucking around. She brings it like gangbusters in her portrayal of Beth, inhabiting the character in a way that leaves you feeling her role in the film is larger than it actually is. Every one of her scenes is virtuoso, but here are my favorites:

"Give her the goddamn camera!"
Never has Mary Tyler Moore's ready smile been used to better knots-in-the-stomach effect

"Mothers don't hate their sons!"
After so much politeness, Moore & Sutherland finally squaring off  is electrifying

A dog named Pippin
This is an absolutely brilliantly played and written scene (watch Moore's shift in expressions). It's like a door being cracked open, only to be slammed shut. Two people trying to connect and not being able to. It breaks my heart every time.

The Hug
On a scale of emotional power, this reverberated through the theater like the chest-busting scene in Alien. I swear, the entire theater seemed to gasp and break into LOUD sobs all at once

PERFORMANCES
Dating back to the first time I ever saw Rebel Without a Cause on TV, I've seldom liked how teenagers have been written or portrayed on screen (except in low-budget '50s and '60s rock & roll musicals). They always seem to have a little too much autonomy, and the graceful, perfect actors playing them too often look like they're play-acting at youthful gawkiness and insecurity. Timothy Hutton turns in an exceptional performance simply by giving the impression he's not "playing" at anything...he's being. He comes across as genuine and age-appropriately hamstrung by his emotional confusion, his character's anguish made all the more heartbreaking because he also comes across as such a sweet, sensitive kid.

Hutton works a kind of miracle with Conrad, granting us a portrait of a tortured youth that manages to sidestep the usual problematic “troubled teen” clichés that so often come across as self-pitying and self-indulgent. Hutton was just 19 at the time, yet there’s nothing callow in how perceptively he conveys the feelings of a young man grappling with grief and self-recrimination. Given that this is the young actor's first major film role (for which he won an Oscar in the bargain), the intensity of feeling Hutton brings to his character is perhaps too-easily attributed to his having lost his real-life father just four months prior to filming (actor Jim Hutton succumbed to liver cancer at age 45); but I think it's just a case of a very talented actor meeting with the perfect role.

Adam Baldwin, Hutton, Carl DiTomasso, Fredric Lehne

As the '80s ushered in the era of the insufferable teenager—interchangeable slasher victims or indistinguishable coming-of-age horndogs—Ordinary People's realistic adolescents gently broke from tradition. Frederic Lehne plays a high school jock actually capable of showing compassion; Dinah Manoff, as Conrad's friend from the mental hospital, struggles to keep depression at bay through strained positivity; and most appealingly of all, Elizabeth McGovern (also making her film debut) as a classmate with whom Conrad shares a mutual crush.  McGovern, who has the quirky, natural charm of a young Paula Prentiss (a frequent Jim Hutton co-star), manages to rescue her character, through sheer force of originality, from being a plot-functional "dream girl" who exists solely to guide Conrad back into the world of feelings.

The charming naturalness of Hutton and McGovern adds poignance to their scenes

Both Redford and Moore have stated that the character of Beth and her inability to display affection reminded them of the non-relationship each had with their respective emotionally-remote, perfectionist fathers. I grew up at a time when, via TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, the patriarchal ideal defined the perfect family. That’s why Ordinary People’s fence-straddling, somewhat ineffectual, but well-intentioned Calvin Jarrett came as such a welcome surprise to me; at last: a divergence from the all-knowing authoritarian father figure of pop-culture propaganda.

Taking on the kind of peace-keeping, empathetic role typically afforded the long-suffering wife in these sorts of domestic dramas, Donald Sutherland—a personal favorite and the only major cast member to fail to receive an Oscar nod—gives an understated performance (Redford initially wanted him for the psychiatrist) whose nuances are all too easy to overlook. An actor most eloquent in his silences (Sutherland’s eyes tend to be more expressive than his face) is at a distinct disadvantage in a film full of so many showier performances; but Calvin’s restrained gentleness has the much-needed effect of humanizing Beth (some part of her must have appreciated his vulnerability) and of making Conrad’s estrangement less torturous, for it's clear he has at least one person in the household in his corner.

Had the Canadian Donald Sutherland been cast in the role of psychiatrist as Redford originally envisioned, critics would have lost the opportunity to project culturally stereotypical significance to Oscar-nominee Judd Hirsch's Jewishness; aka the trope about the "expressive" ethnic character helping the uptight white character to open up. 

“Beth was the character he [Redford] most cared about, and he wanted her to be portrayed with sensitivity. It was she who drew him to the project”  - Mary Tyler Moore

What drew me to Ordinary People was Mary Tyler Moore. I was sitting in a movie theater sometime during the summer of 1980 when I saw the trailer for Ordinary People for the first time. If you’ve never seen it, it’s one of those artfully modulated 2½ minute gems that builds in intensity until the fade-out has everyone in the theater murmuring in excitement. Like most everybody else in America at the time, I was still in the throes of Mary Richards withdrawal. The Mary Tyler Moore Show had ended in 1977, but Moore had been a consistent, cheery staple of television since The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered in 1961, so, even with reruns to salve the pain, by 1980 it still wasn’t easy living in a world without Mary.

I had no advance awareness of Ordinary People, so when Mary Tyler Moore appeared in the trailer behaving in a very un-Mary-like manner, I (and many others in the theater) let out an audible gasp. By the time the trailer was over I was aware of having been gripped by the same excitement I felt when back in 1974 I first read Ann-Margret was to appear in a Ken Russell film (Tommy); or in 1979, when the news came out about Olivia Newton-John, the squeaky-clean queen of soft rock, collaborating with British rockers Electric Light Orchestra on a little ditty called Xanadu. The potential for something unpredictably brilliant is always linked to a star going counter to their image and being cast against-type; so, when Ordinary People opened on Friday, September 19th, I happily stood in line to see it. I wasn’t disappointed. 

Ordinary People is unique in its depiction of a mother as a complex, conflicted individual of depth who, inconsistent with the maternal instinct myth, refuses (is unable?) to assume the traditional familial role of nurturer and healer.

Giving everyone involved in this film their due and not taking a single thing away from a single performance, it nevertheless remains my emphatic assertion that whatever heights Ordinary People soars to—as either motion picture or human drama—are reached on the wings of Mary Tyler Moore’s performance. She’s better than good here. Her performance emanates from a place of truth that serves as a tether wrenching Ordinary People back to reality every time it appears to veer into soap opera or Lifetime movie territory. I find her to be absolutely astounding.

And not for one moment do I pretend to dissociate my reaction to the character of Beth from my personal response to Moore in the role. It’s precisely my inability to fully wrest my awareness of Moore’s endurably likable TV persona from Beth’s rigidity that gives the performance its power. The incongruity of Moore’s quick-to-smile façade masking such groundswells of anger and stony reserve produces in me the exact reaction I imagine Beth’s country club friends would have were they ever catch a glimpse of what lies behind her perfect life of order. 

Everyone from Ann-Margret to Lee Remick was considered
 for the role Moore called "The Holy Grail of my career."

Although it’s heartbreaking to see the degree to which Beth’s steely reserve and need to keep up appearances hurts her family, Moore makes Beth’s defiant defense of her own fiercely guarded vulnerability a thing of icy beauty. You can see the pain, you can see the inner struggle, you can even see what she is most fearful of having to confront by letting down her guard (her sense of being a failure at something that seems very, very important to her--achieving perfection); but just as clearly you can see that she can’t help herself. Like everyone else, she too, is a victim of grief, her coping mechanisms as imprinted on her character as her name on a Marshall Field’s credit card.

Much in the manner that The Graduate's Mrs. Robinson is set up to be that story's villain, yet emerges its most sympathetic character; Beth, in the hands of Mary Tyler Moore, while never quite sympathetic, is so powerless, yet so resolute and repressed, she becomes a tragic figure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

In these days of manufactured social media self-presentation, Photoshop perfectionism, and smartphone photo filters that turn their subjects into pore-free mannequins, a movie about the folly of keeping up appearances and the impossible pursuit of flawless “perfection” could perhaps not be more relevant.

And although Ordinary People is one of the whitest movies ever made, I’ve always been able to identify with it because the image-conscious middle-class world it dramatizes is not at all different from my own childhood growing up as one of the few Black families in an all-white neighborhood.

Everything in its Place

In the assimilationist household I grew up in, upward mobility meant the strict adherence to respectability politics. Under scrutiny whether we were shopping, playing outside, or just emptying the garbage, our family had to be a model of everything white America didn’t expect or want us to be. Black excellence (via perfectionism and achievement) was present in everything from how we kept up our house to how we dressed for school. Although we were a household of five (two older sisters had already married and moved out) and under a great deal of social pressure, we rarely spoke of these matters to one another because, by necessity, the needs and problems of the individual were sublimated to the goals of the family in particular, civil rights and the advancement of all of black America in general.
And let's not forget that during all this, I, as the only boy in the family and gay to boot, instinctively lapsed into "The Best Little Boy in the World" mode; neat, well-mannered, drug-free, straight-A student...all so that I'd never give my parents a moment's worry, ensuring that the pesky little topic of "gay" would never come up. 

No wonder I so identified with all that guilt Conrad carried around!

Were it not for my mother going through EST training in the early ‘70s (after which, talking about EVERYTHING became the household standard, resulting in even my conservative dad becoming alarmingly liberal), I think we could have wound up like the Jarretts.

One of the themes of Ordinary People is that not all breaks are clean, and not everything can be put back together again. But one of life's gifts granted to us as people is that we have this amazing capacity to endure and move on. Like the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet that opens Judith Guest's novel reminds us:

What a shining animal is man,

Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that

For worse than that must follow yet can write

Music, can laugh, play tennis, even plan. 

BONUS MATERIAL

The cast of Ordinary People reunited for Vanity Fair in 2011. Photo by Mark Seliger

Ordinary People theatrical trailer

click to enlarge

Ordinary People was released Friday, September 26, 1980 at the Bruin Theater in Westwood, CA

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018

INSIDE DAISY CLOVER 1965

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. It's a strange feeling, indeed, to harbor a fond memory of a film enjoyed in childhood, only to reencounter it as an adult and find yourself at a complete loss as to what captured your imagination in the first place.

Had this post been written in the recollection of the many times I enjoyed Inside Daisy Clover on late-night TV as a kid, I'm certain my comments and observations would reflect my generally positive response to this not-uninteresting-in-concept (but veering towards camp in execution), very '60s look at 1930s Hollywood and the dark underbelly of the film industry. Back when I could only see Inside Daisy Clover in black & white with commercial interruptions, I guess I was just young enough to have found the era-inappropriate music to be rousing, and the strung-together show biz clichés that make up its plot to be a bold inversion of the usual rags-to-riches success story.
So when, after many years, the opportunity arose for me to finally get a look at Inside Daisy Clover in color, digitally restored, and widescreen, I couldn't pass it up. Alas, I should have left things as they were.

Natalie Wood as Daisy Clover

Robert Redford as Wade Lewis

Christopher Plummer as Raymond Swan

Ruth Gordon as Mrs. Clover

Inside Daisy Clover (adapted by Gavin Lambert from his 1963 novel) is about two traumatic years in the life of its titular character, a 15-year-old Santa Monica beach urchin with a big voice ("I open my mouth and a song comes out") who, in 1936 Hollywood, becomes America's Little Valentine virtually overnight. Advertised at the time with the tagline "The story of what they did to a kid...," Inside Daisy Clover is a behind-the-scenes exposé of the Hollywood Dream Machine as assembly-line sweatshop. A hardhearted fantasy factory that systematically exploits its talent, treats them like property, and ultimately (and callously) discards those who are too sensitive to withstand the near-constant demoralization. All in the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. It's a story Hollywood never seems to tire of telling about itself, this time the familiar tinsel-town pathos given a tawdry facelift by having an adolescent as the target of all the abuse. That is, of course, if you can buy 26-year-old Natalie Wood as a 15-year-old. 

Natalie Wood felt her performance was compromised when the heavily edited film (21 minutes were cut prior to release) left much of her character's motivation and voiceover narration on the cutting room floor. I shudder to think what they left out when what they left in are such piquant Daisy-isms as: "My mother says the world's a garbage dump, and we're just the flies it attracts. Maybe she's right. But when I sing, the smell doesn't seem so bad."

Two things struck me on seeing Inside Daisy Clover again after so many years: 1) A common complaint I have about '60s period films, one so pervasive I should by now accept it as a given (yet can't) is that '60s movies are notorious for always looking like the '60s, no matter what era they intend to depict. Inside Daisy Clover goes through all the trouble of changing the novel's 1950s setting to Hollywood in the 1930s, but beyond a few vintage automobiles scattered here and there, there's a notable lack of period authenticity.

I know it's partly a matter of aesthetics… '30s standards of beauty (pencil-thin eyebrows, baggy clothing, severe hairdos) can be unflattering to celebrities who still need to look alluring to their contemporary fans. But in Inside Daisy Clover, a movie I assume wants to be taken seriously, its anachronistic appearance merely comes off as lazy, cheap, and uncommitted. Compare Inside Daisy Clover's studio-bound, overlit artifice to the gritty 1930s authenticity rendered just four years later in Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. Movie fans who mourn the loss of Old Hollywood need a film like Inside Daisy Clover to remind them of what used to pass for gritty realism in movies before foreign films and Bonnie and Clyde came along to shake things up.  

Former child stars Natalie Wood and Roddy McDowall. 
McDowall (a tad overqualified for such a small role) appears as Walter Baines,
producer Raymond Swan's vaguely sinister flunky 

2) Why is it that when Hollywood attempts to be hard on itself and show the world its true face, warts and all, it comes across as being phonier than when it's feeding us platitudes and myths? Based on what's come to light over the years about the lives of countless child actors, the events of Inside Daisy Clover are far from exaggerated (although perhaps over-acted). Yet, so little of what happens onscreen feels particularly true to life. 

Part of it's due to the performances, which seldom move beyond surface indications of emotions. Another part points to the writing. Everything grim in the movie has been unnecessarily pitched to melodrama (Plummer's Swan only lacks a top hat, cape, and a handlebar mustache to twirl), and those aspects that should be emotionally moving or affecting instead feel under-directed and unengaging. 

For example, Daisy's frequent outbursts and eruptions of temper have all the requisite sound and fury, but there's no anguish behind them. I suspect they're supposed to be born of Daisy's inability to articulate complex feelings, but in Natalie Wood's hands, her often one-note performance turns a young girl's pain into a series of shrill tantrums.

Loopy
Daisy Clover's nervous breakdown while looping a song in a sound booth has become a camp touchstone over the years. I found it quite harrowing when I first saw it as a kid. Now, Natalie's histrionics are overshadowed by my taking note of the inspired sound editing, which is quite marvelously done.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

For reasons that make sense only to me, Inside Daisy Clover remains weirdly engrossing and watchable in spite of not being in the least bit good. How is this possible? Well, chiefly due to my certainty that the entire film is haunted by the campy ghost of Patty Duke as Neely O'Hara in Valley of the Dolls. I can't help it. When I watch Inside Daisy Clover—from fade-in to fade-out—I can't stop drawing parallels between Clover's story and that of the pint-sized trainwreck at the center of Jacqueline Susann's iconic soap opera. That and thinking how much better—and more hilarious—this film would be had Patty Duke been cast instead of Natalie Wood. (Even Clover's "The story of what they did to a kid..." tagline recalls Dolls' "Neely...such a nice kid. Until someone put her name in lights and turned her into a lush!")

I consider myself a fan of the immensely appealing Natalie Wood, but at age 19, Patty Duke would have made for a much more persuasive 15-year-old. Not to mention the fact that Duke's less glamorous, tomboyish looks fit the character better than Wood's delicate, inescapably mature countenance. In addition, Duke's natural speaking voice has the low register and rough edge that Natalie Wood works so conspicuously hard to capture in the film's early scenes. 

The Circus is a Wacky World / Give a Little More
As much as I like her in Splendor in the Grass, I truly find Natalie Wood (who campaigned aggressively for this role) terribly miscast in Inside Daisy Clover. I would have much preferred to see Patty Duke or Sally Field in the part. That's Duke pictured above as Neely O'Hara, just minutes before getting her big song cut from Helen Lawson's show. For the uninitiated: the only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson.

In both form and function, Daisy Clover IS Neely O'Hara to me, and Inside Daisy Clover is full of scenes that recall or inadvertently reference Valley of the Dolls and Patty Duke's legendarily comic dramatic performance. 

Both Neely and Daisy are given to striking "little toughie" postures to convey defiance. Their careers are chronicled with climbing-the-ladder-of-success montages. Each marries a gay or rumored-to-be gay husband. Each suffers a nervous breakdown while trying to manage self-destructive behavior patterns.  And, of course, both Neely and Daisy are singing stars with dubbed voices. Perhaps best of all; Daisy's and Neely's songs were penned by the same composers: husband and wife team Dory & Andre Previn—two individuals who never heard a Vegas-style musical cliché they didn't like.

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford doing what they do best in Inside Daisy Clover...looking pretty.
Wood and Redford reteamed in 1966 for This Property is Condemned

PERFORMANCES
I hate to say it, but 26-year-old Natalie Wood plays Daisy Clover as Peck's Bad Boy with bosoms. She doesn't inhabit the character so much as reduce the rather enigmatically-written teen down to a series of broadly drawn attitudes. There's that awful pixie/waif haircut wig (and if it isn't a wig, Ms. Wood should have sued); the freckles; the studied, ungainly gait; and let's not forget the artfully applied smudges of dirt to the requisite nose and chin to convey pugnacious spunk. 

In lieu of characterization, we're given a too-mature actress in '60s false eyelashes and eyeliner, trying too hard to convey spirited adolescence by utilizing cartoonishly rendered explosions of piss and vinegar feistiness. 

Riled-Up Ragamuffin
I half expected her to sound like Edward G. Robinson in this scene

Like Elizabethg Taylor, Natalie Wood is an actress that needs a strong director. And when she has one (Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, Love With the Proper Stranger), she always delivers. It's hard to guess what director Robert Mulligan was going for, but Wood's performance during the first ten minutes of Inside Daisy Clover borders on amateurish. She's so unpersuasive in these scenes that it takes the film a long time to regain its footing. Wood gets better once she drops the butch act, but not by much. I don't know if this is considered one of the worst performances of her career, but I'll wager it's pretty close. 

Ruth Gordon was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Daisy's eccentric (what else?) mother.
To be fair, this was Gordon's return to the screen after a 22-year absence. The Academy had no way of knowing she'd be giving variations on this same performance for the next 20.

My favorite performance in the film is given by Christopher Plummer as the ironfisted producer, Raymond Swan. Plummer plays him in an amusingly reptilian manner—holding himself very still, lizard-like eyes darting about—making his scenes the most compelling in the movie. But, unfortunately, the same can't be said for gorgeous superstar-to-be Robert Redford. His method of conveying ladykiller charm is to precede each line of dialog with a drop of his chin and a purposeful stare upwards into the eyes of whomever he's talking to...like a superannuated member of some boy band.

Daisy gets Schooled

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I do have a weak spot for Inside Daisy Clover's two big production numbers. The songs: You're Gonna Hear from Me, and The Circus is a Wacky World are arranged in a manner that plants them firmly in the mid-1960s, making Daisy's 1930s musical clips look like excerpts from a TV variety special. The numbers are staged by choreographer Herbert Ross (he did the numbers for Funny Girl - 1968), who would later make his film directing debut with Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969) and go on to have a successful, Oscar-nominated career as a film director and producer. 

"Listen, world, you're gonna love me!"
Intergalactic megalomaniac Daisy Clover foists herself on an unsuspecting planet

Like Sammy Davis Jr's I Gotta Be Me, Frank Sinatra's My Way, Anthony Newley's Gonna Build a Mountain, or Helen Lawson's immortal I'll Plant My Own Tree, Daisy Clover's You're Gonna Hear from Me is one of those self-aggrandizing show-biz anthems beloved of aging pop stars and Vegas lounge singers. Though the song failed to nab that Best Song Oscar nomination it was so blatantly seeking, in 2003, Barbra Streisand covered it for her The Movie Album.

The Pepto-Bismol-pink musical extravaganza, The Circus is a Wacky World stands as Inside Daisy Clover's metaphor for the phoniness of Hollywood. It's also a melody so infectious that it takes several days to dislodge it from your brain after seeing the film. 

Character actor and vaudevillian song and dance man Paul Hartman (best known as Emmett the handyman on The Andy Griffith Show) is seen here with Natalie Wood in a deleted scene. Most likely from the film-within-a-film "Dime Store Kid."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It's difficult to imagine how any well-constructed film can survive the excision of 21 minutes of footage, so perhaps one of my biggest dissatisfactions with Inside Daisy Clover might, in part, be the result of how much had to be left out. As it stands, Daisy's disillusionment with Hollywood is near-instantaneous. We're never given even one scene where she's happy to have her dream come true.

That being said, it's still unlikely that Inside Daisy Clover would ever register with me again as it did when I was young. For one, when I was a kid, EVERYBODY looked older, and it didn't bother me so much how little Natalie Wood looked or acted like a teen. Now, I can't get past it. Similarly, the then-shocking revelations of the film—bisexuality, adultery, family dysfunction, child labor abuses—lack much gravity in a screenplay where the characters are given so little dimension. 

Katharine Bard is really rather good as Raymond Swan's neglected wife, Melora.
There are better screencaps I could have used of her, but the ever-shaggable Robert Redford is just so darn cute here

On a positive note, I must say that Inside Daisy Clover looks rather spectacular in widescreen DVD. 

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES:

Christopher Plummer
I got this autograph back in 1983 when I was taking dance classes in New York. Plummer was walking down the street somewhere in the theater district, and I asked if he would be so kind as to sign this (a schedule from Jo-Jos Dance Studio). Of course, I had one of those cheap pens that made you scratch the paper just to get ink to come out. That accounts for the undecipherable first word preceding "...of best wishes" in the autograph above. As I recall, he was very courteous, very tall, very tan (this was dead of winter, mind you), and VERY handsome!

Inside Daisy Clover opened in Los Angeles on
Wednesday, December 22, 1965 at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

HISTORY REPEATING? THE GREAT GATSBY 1974 / 2013

 Nick: “You can’t repeat the past.”

Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”

As early reviews for Baz Luhrmann's heavily-touted, much-anticipated, $127 million, 3D adaptation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's enduring classic, The Great Gatsby, threaten to duplicate the less-than-sparkling reception of Jack Clayton's equally over-hyped 1974 version; a repost of my essay on the Robert Redford / Mia Farrow starrer appears on the terrific movie site- Moviepilot. 

Click on the title link below:

A Look Back at the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby"

Its superfluous 3-D aside, were I 16-years-old (my age when I caught 70s "Gatsby Fever"), I would be all over this rather dazzling-looking remake, critics be damned. It'll be interesting to see how a new Gatsby for a new generation is received. Remakes are a curious and inextricable part of the Hollywood moviemaking machine. Cynical in their calculated desire to recapture what has come before, yet they also possess a very Gatsby-esque type of optimism in hoping that perhaps, "this time" will be different.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

                                                             F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Copyright © Ken Anderson