FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 1967

Beyond the obvious need to lure the American public away from their TV sets with size and spectacle impossible to match on the small screen, I’m not sure I've ever been totally clear on the thought process behind the '60s epic. I can understand when the subject’s a heroic historical figure (Lawrence of Arabia), or the backdrop is something as broad in scope as the Russian Revolution (Doctor Zhivago); but when the roadshow treatment (widescreen, two-plus-hours running time, reserved seats, intermission) is imposed upon relatively intimate stories of love, relationships, and the flaws of character that lead to tragedy (Ryan’s Daughter), I can’t help but feel that the outsized visual scale of the epic can sometimes work to undermine the effectiveness of the human drama. Such is what I find to be the case with John Schlesinger’s otherwise superior adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.

Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdine

Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak 

Terence Stamp as Sergeant Frank Troy

Peter Finch as William Boldwood

In earlier posts, I've expressed my weakness for visual ostentation and how readily I’m able to overlook a film’s shortcomings when its deficiencies are mitigated by a certain stylistic panache. However, the impressive cast John Schlesinger assembled for Far From the Madding Crowd is so fascinating in their own right (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp) that all the pomp and spectacle of the production values surrounding them makes a perfect case against the need to gild the lily.

Far from the Madding Crowd is an outsized film of subtle emotions that might have benefited greatly from the kind of intimate style employed by Ken Russell for his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's  Women in Love.

MGM’s handing over the reins of a $4 million adaptation of a Thomas Hardy classic to the creative team behind the modestly-funded, ultra-mod, youth-culture hit, Darling (1965), was either an inspired stroke of genius or a simple act of crass commercialism. Inspired, certainly, in conjecturing that the very contemporary talents of producer Joseph Janni, director John Schlesinger, screenwriter Frederic Raphael, and actress Julie Christie (with the added assist of her Fahrenheit 451 cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg) could bring to this Victorian-era period piece the same verve and freshness they brought to their cynical evisceration of swinging London. Crassly commercial, undeniably, in a studio attempting to hit boxoffice paydirt merely by reassembling the hot-property talents of a current success, heedless of their suitability to the material at hand.

While I tend to think MGM was thinking with their pocketbooks more than their heads (Hollywood at the time was literally throwing open its doors to any and everyone who displayed the slightest trace of knowing what young audiences were looking for), I have to also admit that in many ways, Thomas Hardy’s take on Wessex countryside life in 1874 and Schlesinger’s view of 1965 London are a better fit than first glance would reveal.

Bathsheba finds herself the focus of the amorous attentions of three men

As embodied by Julie Christie, Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdine is easily the spiritual cousin of Darling’s Diana Scott. While lacking Diana’s heartlessness, Bathsheba, like Diana, is of an individualistic, determined, and headstrong nature, tempered by the foibles of pride, vanity, and a kind of reckless self-enchantment with her own powers of allure. Nowhere near as passive as Hardy’s most popular heroine, the unfortunate Tess of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Bathsheba is a non-heroic heroine of unfailingly human-sized passions and idiosyncrasies. Conflictingly led by her heart, her indomitability, and a barely-masked need to have her beauty regarded by others—for no reason beyond the immature, yet very human desire to be reassured of their worth from time to time—Bathsheba is less the traditional romantic heroine ruled by her passions than a kind of rural Circe, bewitching and dooming the hapless men who cross her path.

Self Enchanted
A landowner, a businesswoman, and an independent spirit 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m not one to demand that a film adaptation of a book hew slavishly to the written word. Of course, I love it when a film made from a favorite novel is translated to the screen in terms compliant to the way I envisioned it (Goodbye, Columbus), but I’m just as happy if a filmmaker deviates from the text if they are able to unearth something new, something wholly cinematic that captures the book’s essence, if not its exact plot (Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). I only got around to reading Far From the Madding Crowd last year, some 34 years after I saw the film version, and beyond the then-controversial casting of the blond Christie in the role of the fiery brunette Bathsheba, I found Schlesinger’s film to be surprisingly faithful to the book.

A highlight of both the book and the film is the "swordplay" seduction scene

Perhaps too faithful, as the self-deprecating director indicated to biographer William J. Mann in the biographical memoir, The Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. In addressing claims that the film was far too long and atypically slow in pacing, Schlesinger lamented: “We didn't take enough liberty with the film because we were too worried about taking liberties with a classic.”  And indeed the film displays the kind of reverence to text that makes Far From the Madding Crowd the kind of film perfect for high-school literature classes, but for me, the movie is more atmospherically leisurely than slow. I love the time Schlesinger gives over to giving us colorful views of country farm life and the romantic quadrangle at the heart of the film (pentagonal if one includes the tragic Fanny Robin, the farm girl with just about as much luck as the traditional heroine of Victorian literature).

Prunella Ransome portrays Fanny Robin, a young servant girl in love with the dashing Sergeant Troy (Stamp). Were this an epic musical taking place in 19-century France, hers would be the Anne Hathaway role.

I fell in fell in love with Far From the Madding Crowd chiefly because of Julie Christie (surprise!) but also because it is refreshing to see a sweeping epic film of this type with a strong woman at its center. A woman whose agency and choices not only propel the events of the story, but whose destiny is shaped by her desires (what she does and doesn't want), not merely by the vagaries of fate.

As far as I'm concerned, the film has a tough time recovering from a huge loss of credibility when Julie Christie rebuffs the matrimonial advances of that absolutely gorgeous slab of hirsute hunk, Alan Bates. Seriously, what was she thinking?

PERFORMANCES

I’m afraid if I log one more post in which I wax rhapsodic on the wonders of Julie Christie, my partner is going in search of professional help (for either me or himself), so I’ll make this brief. In Bathsheba Everdine, Christie is cast as yet another shallow petulant—a character of the sort she virtually trademarked in the '60s with her roles in Darling, Fahrenheit 451 (the Montag’s wife half of her dual role, anyway), and Petulia. Christie’s artistry and gift in being able to convey the emotional depth behind the superficial has been, I think, the obvious intelligence that has always been an inseverable part of her beauty and appeal. It takes a lot of brains to play thoughtless.

Mad Love

As good as Christie is (and for me, her star quality alone galvanizes this monolithic movie) the top acting honors go to Peter Finch who gives the screen one of the most searing portraits of tortured obsession since James Mason in Lolita. One of my favorite scenes is a silent one where the camera is trained on Finch’s face as Christie’s character rides by in a wagon. In his eyes alone you can see a wellspring of hope rise and fall in a matter of seconds. It really takes something to upstage Julie Christie, and she is very good here. But Peter Finch really won me over by giving the film's most realized and moving performance.

Scenes depicting English country life are beautifully rendered

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The production values of Far From the Madding Crowd are first rate. The time and place is richly evoked in lavish costumes, painstaking period detail, and vivid depictions of rural life. Still, while the large-format Panavision does well when it comes to dramatically capturing the tempestuous forces of nature which underscore the impassioned carryings-on of Hardy’s characters, the sheer size of Far From the Madding Crowd keeps me at a slight emotional remove. Nicolas Roeg’s ofttimes astonishingly beautiful camerawork strives rather valiantly to imbue the picture-postcard compositions with as much humanity and sensitivity as possible. The story is so engaging and the performances so good that one longs to be brought closer, but too often the film leaves us feeling as if we are looking at these lives through the wide-lens end of a pair of binoculars.

Cinematographer, later-turned-director Nicolas Roeg was the unofficial caretaker of the Julie Christie "look" early in her career. He also photographed her to breathtaking effect for Fahrenheit 451, Petulia, and in 1973 he directed her in Don't Look Now

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Far From the Madding Crowd did not do too well at the boxoffice in 1968. Critics complained of everything from the central miscasting of Christie to the pacing, the relative inaction, and a screenplay that fails to bring its central character to life. Another factor, at least in part, is that the film was promoted as a grand romance, when the real love story begins about 60 seconds before this 168-minute movie ends. In between, it's largely a roundelay of unrequited passions and thwarted affections.  To its detriment, in hoping to be the next epic romance in the Doctor Zhivago vein, Far From the Madding Crowd wound up being primarily a drama about people who are either in love with the right people at the wrong time, or the wrong people at the right time.

The Valentine which sets the tragic drama in motion 

Far From the Madding Crowd is a movie I like to revisit because in it I find a poignant meditation on love. The three men seeking the hand of Bathsheba offer her three distinct types of love: passionate and sensual; a near-paternal adoration; and finally, the calm, even-tempered love of respect and friendship. Which is truer? Which is preferable? The film never answers, but there is much to read into the film’s final scene. Look at it carefully, there’s a lot going on. Look at the expressions on the faces, the placement of the characters in a kind of domestic tableau, take note of the weather, the significance of the color red, the recurring clock and timepiece motifs, the framing of the final shot…then draw your own conclusions. Like the ambiguously happy ending of  Mike Nichols' The Graduate, everyone seems to come away from Far From The Madding Crowd with a different impression of what the ending signifies.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

DAISY MILLER 1974

“Such, my angels, is the role of sex in history”

                                                          The Lion in Winter (1968) 

Well, someone could certainly write a book (and a heavy tome it would be) about the role of sex in Hollywood history. Especially when it comes to the influence libidinal urges have had on casting decisions, the role sex and romantic entanglements have played in the launching and ruination of careers.

During award season, when film industry types enjoy engaging in conspicuously self-serious back-patting sessions about the artistry, bravery, and courage it takes to get their creative visions to the screen...one would assume that all of moviemaking is a meritocracy. That people rise and fall by measure of professional merit, and that all decisions relative to the making of a motion picture are decisions based on talent and ability exclusively. 

Closer to the truth is that Hollywood is more of insiders club and that a great many decisions—particularly those relative to casting—emanate from below the belt. The Hollywood paradigm has traditionally been that of a patriarchic boys' club built upon cronyism, nepotism, and cliques. Its inherent misogyny, racism, and sexism feeding into the normalizing of a kind of “vertical casting couch” sensibility when it comes to the relationship between those in power (male producers and directors) and those with relatively little (actresses). 

Few behind-the-scenes Hollywood clichés are as enduring and tiresomely pervasive as that of the movie director who falls in love/lust with his leading lady. Whether it be infatuation (George Sidney and Ann-Margret: Bye Bye Birdie), obsession (Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren: The Birds, Marnie), love affair (Clint Eastwood and well…everybody), or subsequent matrimony (Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)—the faces change, but the particulars have the same weary ring: movie contact = movie contract. (I’ll save the male-on-male wing of this phenomenon [director Luchino Visconti and Helmut Berger] for another time.)

An inevitable phase of these soundstage passions as they blossom into romantic love is when the father-figure/mentor is inspired to star his muse/protégé in a work of classical literature. Paramount head Robert Evans acquired the rights to The Great Gatsby for wife Ali MacGraw before she made a literal getaway with her The Getaway co-star Steve McQueen, summarily ending both her marriage and her career. Roman Polanski had a dream of casting wife Sharon Tate as the ruined heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles before her tragic death.
Director Peter Bogdanovich garnered considerable bad press when, during the making of The Last Picture Show he fell in love with model-turned-screen-ingenue Cybill Shepherd and wound up leaving his then-pregnant wife Polly Platt (the film’s production designer) and their toddler daughter. The flames of Bogdanovich's and Shepherd's already highly-publicized Svengali scandal were further fanned when the director decided to star his lady love as the title character in a movie version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller. 

Cybill Shepherd as Annie P. "Daisy" Miller

Barry Brown as Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne

Cloris Leachman as Mrs. Ezra B. Miller

Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Walker

Mildred Natwick as Mrs. Costello

Duilio Del Prete as Mr. Giovanelli

Adapted from Henry James’ 1879 novella, Daisy Miller tells the story of a headstrong, over-indulged young lady from Schenectady, New York traveling Europe with her family in 1876. The Miller family: vivacious, gadabout Daisy (Shepherd), bratty little brother Randolph (James McMurtry), and distracted mother (Leachman), are a ragingly nouveau riche clan and the walking embodiment of the Ugly American. Uncurious, unsophisticated, and forever talking about everything being so much better back home; appearances brand them modern and out-of-step with antiquated formalities, but in actuality they are simply primitive.

It is Daisy, however (no one calls her by her given name, Annie), imbued with enough beauty, charm, and convivial graces to mitigate her shortcomings, who has learned to turn her forthright baseness into a kind of performance art. A mass of flirtatious affectations and frilly adornments, Daisy is a perpetual motion machine of restive parasol twirling and fan-fluttering, all choreographed to the trill of her own relentless, mindless chatter.

So thoroughly is Daisy a creature of self-interest, that in the restrictive atmosphere of European society and its rigidly-adhered-to codes of conduct and decorum, her guileless impudence might easily be mistaken for nose-thumbing recklessness at worst, proto-feminist rebellion at best. But of course, given Daisy’s thorough lack of awareness—self or otherwise—what we’re really witness to is a display of America’s top commodity and chief export: entitled arrogance.

Our Daisy as you're most apt to find her...mouth wide open and talking a blue streak

While touring Vevey, Switzerland, Daisy meets American expatriate (the name white immigrants have devised for themselves) Frederick Winterbourne; a formal and reserved young man who has lived abroad so long that he is unaware of how thoroughly he has absorbed and assimilated the repressive manners and moral customs of Europe. Ever the flirt, Daisy takes great pleasure in ruffling Winterbourne’s starchy feathers, heedless of the obvious fact that her actions largely succeed in merely confounding him.

As both parties later descend upon Rome, Winterbourne’s cautious courtship of Daisy both mirrors and is impacted by the pressures of aristocratic propriety. Their principle difficulties arising out of Daisy not caring a whit for social conventions and Winterbourne being fairly ruled by them. Though there is mutual attraction, things keep getting gummed up by the near-constant misunderstanding of overtures and misreading of gestures.

In this beautifully composed shot, Mr. Winterbourne keeps his eye on Daisy (seen in the mirror behind him, talking to the hostess, Mrs. Walker) while Mrs. Miller prattles away to no one in particular. Meanwhile, Randolph amuses himself with the silverware

Daisy’s greatest sin stems from the fact that she’s a self-possessed, fully grown adult who dares to bristle at the 19th-century mandate that says, because she's a woman, she is obliged to conduct herself like a helpless child. The confining affectations of propriety that require women to seek male authorization, maternal escort, or societal consent for even the most innocuous activities don’t sit well with the freewheeling Daisy. Thus, it isn’t long before her penchant for doing just as she pleases results in tongues wagging, invitations withdrawn, and puts her reputation and social standing (such as it is) at risk.

The romantic dilemma this poses for Winterbourne, who keeps company with far too many old gossips and is forever second-guessing himself, is whether the mere appearance of transgression is as damning as the actual thing. Winterbourne hopes Daisy is only a recklessly naïve girl and not the fallen woman everyone believes her to be, but things are not helped by his never thawing out long enough to honestly express his feelings for her. Nor does Daisy drop her flirt-and-tease façade long enough to be as direct with him in her words as she prides herself as being in her actions.

The outcome of Daisy Miller is foretold by the deliberate names of its characters, the combination of daisies and winter evoking images of growth restricted and certain death.

For those of us of a certain age, Daisy Miller is largely remembered as the film that broke Peter Bogdanovich’s three-film boxoffice winning streak: The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and What’s Up Doc?. And while critics at the time treated it with more kindness than its reputation would suggest, it was nevertheless a film the public found very easy to resist.

Part of this, I think, is attributable to something Bogdanovich references in his commentary on this DVD: that Daisy Miller was made several years before the vogue in Merchant/Ivory-style period picture adaptations of literary classics. But as a member of “the public” who recalls all the magazine covers and gossip columns, I can say that another... and I might add, sizable...reason for resistance to Daisy Miller had a lot to do with the public’s oversaturation with the Svengali/Trilby roadshow Bogdanovich and Shepherd treated us to on talk shows and in the press. 

Innocent flirt or fallen woman?

Bogdanovich likes to believe that people resented the couple’s happiness. Undoubtedly this is true to some degree. But from where I sat, Bogdanovich and Shepherd failed to see how callous and unfeeling their public declarations of love and happiness came across, given that everyone with access to Rona Barrett or Rex Reed knew it came at the cost of betraying a pregnant wife (and artistic collaborator) and abandoning a child.

True love may have been in flower for this “beautiful people” pair, but we common folk merely saw an oft-repeated Hollywood cliché: unprepossessing, neophyte director dumps his lean-years wife for blonde goddess starlet at the first flush of success. 

In addition, the public (as consumers and ticket-buyers) like to think of ourselves as the star-makers...that we are the ones who determine who is and who isn't movie star material. But Bogdanovich had deemed Cybill a star whether we liked it or not and proceeded to shove Cybill down our throats (he produced an ear-torture vanity project LP of his lady love singing songs by Cole Porter), branding her an A-List leading lady before it was even earned.

I’m not sure what Bogdanovich saw when he looked at Cybill Shepherd (likely, the funny, talented actress and singer she eventually grew to be), but at the time, I have to say I saw only a meagerly gifted girl of well-scrubbed attractiveness. She was wonderful in The Last Picture Show, but as a member of a strong ensemble, not star material.

When it was announced that the inexperienced former model was to actually star in Daisy Miller, everyone (except Bogdanovich, apparently) seized on the irony of this well-known Orson Welles idolater, in essence, recreating those scenes in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane insists upon making his modestly-talented sweetheart into an opera singer for his own ego-driven reasons. So, no...by the time Daisy Miller made it to the screen, the public not only wanted this couple to fail, they needed them to.

While I recognize it’s unfair to judge a film based on the personal lives of the people making it, I’m also not so naïve as not to also understand that the obfuscation of reality and fantasy is the absolute cornerstone of the Hollywood star system. The public’s interest in Elizabeth Taylor’s real-life scandals helped make many an Elizabeth Taylor clunker into a hit (The Sandpiper). In fact, the studios relied upon it. The only time people in the film industry think the merging of private and professional is unjust is when it bites them in the ass at the boxoffice.

Winterbourne: "Wouldn't it be funny if they both were perfectly innocent and
sincere and had no idea of the impression they were creating?"
Mrs. Costello: "No, it wouldn't be funny."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

With Daisy Miller, Peter Bogdanovich has crafted what I feel is a handsomely mounted, exquisitely filmed and costumed, and at times, genuinely moving adaptation of Henry James’ short novel. Uncommonly faithful to its source material, not only are the locations precise, and the actors fit the physical descriptions of their characters to a T, but the script adheres so closely to the text you could actually follow along with the book while watching the film. 

Bogdanovich's cinematic eye is as sharp as ever, and the film never feels sluggish or airless like a great many costume dramas. Daisy Miller is a rarity in period dramas in that it is also very entertaining and watchable. Its flaws are minor, and it plays very much like the old-fashioned period films of Hollywood's Golden Age when sharp storytelling and keen pacing took precedence over the kind of over-referential stiffness that later came to exemplify films of the genre.

Indeed, so much is so ideal about Daisy Miller that it’s rather a shame my only complaint falls on the weakness presented by Daisy herself. The actress portraying her, that is, not the character.

Daisy, making friends and influencing people. Not.

With a great deal of humor and style, Bogdanovich has constructed a semi-tragic comedy of manners that feels like Theodore Dreiser American vulgarity meets Edith Wharton British propriety. He finds ample opportunities to dramatize the contrasts between the dreary Eurocentrism of the Miller family and the studied hypocrisy of Americans abroad who have adopted the customs of the British aristocracy.

Interweaving this with a love story that never can get started, Bogdanovich, who clearly envisions Daisy as something of an early suffragette and feminist, still leaves it up to us to draw our own conclusions as to whether Daisy’s independence is the result of a unique brand of Yankee boorishness or an admirable resistance to senseless social constriction.

This societal drama is sensitively and amusingly played out, but what’s lacking is a Daisy capable of conveying even a hint of why, beneath all the flirting and white-noise chatter, she is worthy of the attention James/Winterbourne/Bogdanovich expend on her.

Watching Daisy Miller, I was left with the impression that the fatal flaw of the film is that Bogdanovich took Shepherd's appeal as a given. Certain that Cybill was "born for the role" and that she and Daisy were one and the same, he simply plops her in front of the camera. Gone is the protective, loving care of the sort lavished on her performance in The Last Picture Show. Here he allows Cybill to merely be Cybill, certain that audiences will find her to be as bewitching as he clearly had found her to be. It's a special talent to be able to project one's personality on the screen. Shepherd, at this point, was simply too green.  

PERFORMANCES

For a brief moment in time, Bogdanovich had wanted to star opposite Shephard in Daisy Miller with Orson Welles directing. While the idea sounds positively bananas, the side of me that loves Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Showgirls kinda wishes it had actually happened.

In considering projects for Shepherd to star in, Bogdanovich stated that it was down to Daisy Miller and Calder Willingham’s 1972 novel Rambling Rose. Rambling Rose was made into a film in 1991 and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its star, 24-year-old Laura Dern.

I bring this up to illustrate why I think Cybill Shepherd’s largely cosmetic performance in Daisy Miller is what ultimately stops it from being the film it could have been. Shepherd and Dern were roughly the same age when making these films; both stories are about naïve young women who innocently threaten the pervasive social structure. 

Somber Barry Brown, who committed suicide in 1978, gives the film's best performance;
his sad-eyed melancholy fairly aching to be relieved by the life force that is Daisy

Going by type alone, Cybill Shepherd would have been well-cast as Rose, just as Dern would have made a fine Daisy Miller. But to look at what these two actresses do with the roles they were ultimately given is to understand the subtle but lethal difference between capable amateur and gifted professional.

Shepherd is not awful in Daisy Miller, she does have her moments. But her performance is largely external and superficial. Saddled with a character who never shuts up and a director fond of long single takes, Shepherd obviously had her hands full. Thus Shepherd can't be faulted if (as my partner noted with his usual perspicacity), after delivering--in machine gun rap--what must be page upon page of dialogue and hitting all those marks, she invariably resorts to hoisting that prominent chin of hers and adopting a look of smug self-satisfaction at having simply made it through the whole thing without having made a mistake. It's clear she's doing the best that she can. Nuance of performance be damned, she remembered it all!

Try as she might, lovely Cybill Shepherd has but a single, all-purpose expression to offer the camera when it comes in for a close-up. Ideal for magazine covers, it's a non-look that communicates considerably less than Bogdanovich thinks

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As literary heroines go, I find Daisy Miller to be a captivating (if exasperating) heartbreaker. I loved her on the printed page, her deceptively complex, out-of-step-with-the-times character fitting in with the women I fell in love with in Far From The Madding Crowd, Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie, and Anna Karenina. Perhaps because I liked the book so much and because Bogdanovich’s adaptation is so glowingly faithful to it, I can overlook the shortcomings I have about Cybill Shepherd in the role.

As I’ve stated, the film can be very moving at times (I get waterworks at the end, no matter how many times I see it), so perhaps, when I relinquish my desire for what Daisy could have been and allow myself to enjoy THIS Daisy (Shepherd is not without her charm), the emotions and thwarted romance of the story are able to reach my heart.

Mildred Natwick is a real delight in her brief scenes. This amusingly well-turned-out bathhouse is just one of many examples of Bogdanovich adding visual interest to dialogue-heavy sequences

Staying true to his devotion to creating a kind of Orson Wells-type repertory company of actors, Bogdanovich features in Daisy Miller many of the players from The Last Picture Show. Eileen Brennan and Duilio Del Prete went on to join Shepherd in Bogdanovich's next feature, the equally ill-fated At Long Last Love.

Had I seen Daisy Miller when it was released, I'm fairly certain I would have disliked it. In the heat of huge 1974 releases like Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, The Great Gatsby, Mame, The Towering Inferno, and countless disaster films and Oscar contenders (1974 was a biggie!), I'm afraid I wouldn't have appreciated Daisy Miller's small-scale virtues.

When it comes to watching the film today, I'd be lying if I said it didn't mitigate matters considerably, knowing that time and cruel fate have mellowed what once seemed so obnoxious and insufferable about Hollywood's "It" couple (Peter & Cybill) and my feelings about the project as a whole. 

It's easier to recognize and appreciate what a talented director Peter Bogdanovich is when he's not telling us so. Likewise, knowing that Cybill Shepherd went out and studied and ultimately matured into a very good actress and comedienne, that I like her introspective take on her younger self (her autobiography Cybill Disobedience is a great read), and respect her political activism; well...it all goes a long way toward getting me to relinquish my dogged resistance to her professional inexperience as Daisy and simply enjoy the many pleasures this film has to offer.
Funny how time has the power to work that kind of magic.

BONUS MATERIAL

When in Rome, Daisy and her family stay at The Hotel Bristol. Which also happens
 to be the name of the fictional hotel where Barbra Streisand wreaks havoc in What's Up, Doc? 

Cybill Shepherd wrote a bestselling autobiography in 2000 

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or interfere with anything I do."

 Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017