Robert Mulligan (1965)

Daisy Clover is a tomboy teenager who lives with her dotty mother in a rickety trailer on a California beach front.  Daisy, who dreams of being a Hollywood star, cuts a disc in a nearby record-your-voice booth and sends it to a studio head called Raymond Swan.  He gives Daisy a contract and she soon becomes a huge name – ‘America’s Little Valentine’.  She also quickly discovers the price of fame:  Swan has Daisy’s mother banged up in a mental institution and Daisy is made to pretend to the press that she’s an orphan.  Wade Lewis, the dashing young leading man of Swan pictures, introduces Daisy to a life of wild parties and heavy drinking.  To the displeasure of Swan (whom Wade nicknames ‘the Prince of Darkness’), the couple marry but Wade abandons Daisy during their honeymoon in Arizona.  On her return to Hollywood, she finds out that Wade is a closet homosexual and falls into the arms of Swan instead. Daisy gets her mother out of the institution and sets her up in a beach house that’s a cut above the one they started out in.  The mother dies (of natural causes).  Daisy has a nervous breakdown, retires to the beach house and tries to commit suicide.  Having failed, she decides to blow up the house.  The film ends with Daisy marching along the beach, the exploded house burning behind her.  When a passer-by asks what happened, she answers, ‘Someone declared war!’

This tale of a prodigious young musical talent used and abused by thirties Hollywood naturally brings Judy Garland to mind:  the film begins on Daisy’s sixteenth birthday in 1936, which makes her two years older than Garland.  But Daisy is played by a very different starlet, whose presence makes this terrible, bizarre movie all the more terrible and bizarre.  Natalie Wood, after making a fleeting screen debut shortly after her fifth birthday in 1943, worked solidly in Hollywood from 1946 through to the end of the 1960s.  It’s not surprising that Wood felt the character of Daisy Clover spoke strongly to her and was keen to play Daisy.  Any validity that she has in the role is thanks to her own past as a teenage star – and to the fact that, as an adult actor, Wood continued to perform like a typical child actor of her time.   Older audiences are often enthralled by the Infant Phenomenon aspect of child acting, finding it marvellous how a little kid can remember all those lines and put on a funny voice and do comical movements, and so on.   At the start of Inside Daisy Clover, Natalie Wood plays the heroine in a way that seems designed to appeal to this kind of viewer.   She does an overdone tomboyish walk (that actually makes you more aware of her woman’s body) with facial expressions to match.  She eases off once Daisy goes to Hollywood.  When, still and silent, she’s listening to another character, Wood is occasionally interesting to watch – though more because she’s stopped being exuberantly phony than because of anything that she expresses.  (The film’s title turns out to be a misnomer unless we’re meant to think that inside Daisy Clover is an empty space.)  You know that Daisy has got her mojo back in the sequences describing her repeatedly interrupted suicide attempt because Natalie Wood resumes the comic overacting she did in the opening scenes.  In the movie’s final moments, she strides exaggeratedly away from destruction and towards the camera, as brassily perky as when she started.

Natalie Wood’s inauthenticity goes beyond her qualities as an actress – in ways that may even be intentional.  She’s playing a girl with a golden voice but her singing is mostly done by someone else, the session singer Jackie Ward[1].    Is this fakery meant to illustrate the illusionism-of-entertainment lyric of ‘The Circus is a Wacky World’, one of the songs written for the film by André and Dory Previn?   Daisy is still not yet eighteen by the end of the film – I’m not sure what the legal age of consent was in 1930s California but there’s a reference to her as jailbait.  Wood was twenty-seven when Inside Daisy Clover was released and she’s not remotely believable as a teenager.  But this helps to muffle the sexual exploitation of Daisy by much older male characters, Wade Lewis and, especially, Raymond Swan.  Natalie Wood was only two years younger than Robert Redford (Wade) and only nine years younger than Christopher Plummer (Swan).

Robert Mulligan was a decent director of mainstream, broadly realistic dramas (Fear Strikes Out, To Kill a Mockingbird, Baby the Rain Must Fall).  He, his producing partner Alan J Pakula and Natalie Wood had recently worked together with success on Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) but Mulligan was temperamentally the wrong man for the Hollywood dream-to-nightmare story that Inside Daisy Clover seems meant to be.  The characters and the plot in Gavin Lambert’s screenplay, adapted from his own novel, suggest a piece of caustic camp.  The movie probably might not have been any more enjoyable done as a cartoon melodrama but the very occasional OTT moments make you realise that a more garish treatment would have been truer to the spirit of Lambert’s material.  An example comes when Melora (Katharine Bard), the smiling-outside-crying-inside wife of Swan, gets drunk and screeches the true cause of her indisposition:  ‘I don’t have a headache – I have a heartache!’  In the film’s opening episode, things said and done by the minor characters at Angel Beach call for a fey, oddball vibrancy; in Mulligan’s hands, these sequences are even-paced and the eccentricity is laboured.   When Daisy is summoned by Swan to the studios to do a voice and screen test for him and Melora, this takes place on a vast, otherwise empty sound stage.  The scale of the setting and the lack of light combine to give the scene, when it begins, a surreal quality.  The colourless direction soon dilutes this.

There are things in the storytelling and a few individual scenes that are puzzling, to say the least:  it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the fault lies with Mulligan or with Gavin Lambert’s screenplay.  Because Swan takes immediate action to remove all trace of her mother and Daisy, equally instantly, feels sad and guilty about this, the heroine never gets a chance to enjoy her fame.  This seems a mistake in dramatic terms:  it denies Daisy the opportunity to see the error of her ways and reduces the emotional rise and fall of the film.  The Prince of Darkness’s supposedly iron control of his stars is in fact conveniently erratic:  he’s miffed when Daisy and Wade impulsively decide to marry but, it seems, powerless to do anything about it.  Since Swan needs to be ever vigilant in preventing the truth of Wade’s sexuality becoming a problem, why doesn’t he tell Daisy about it in order to stop the wedding and spare Swan Pictures the PR difficulties arising from the marriage’s collapse?  After Daisy’s had her breakdown and taken to her bed in the beach house, Wade pays her a visit.  She appears surprisingly pleased to see him but there’s no follow-up to this.  Daisy destroys the beach house with the idea that she’ll be presumed cremated in the conflagration.  Shortly before exiting the place, she’s cut her hair but she doesn’t look remotely different:  it doesn’t pay to ask how America’s Little Valentine will disappear into the anonymity she’s presumably after.  Robert Mulligan’s pedestrianism doesn’t obscure the anachronistic elements of the film.  Natalie Wood’s make-up, hairstyle and costumes for Daisy’s Hollywood numbers all suggest the 1960s rather than the 1930s.  So do the Previns’ songs – especially Daisy’s signature number, ‘You’re Gonna Hear from Me’.  The anachronism is reinforced by hearing this alongside actually contemporary songs (‘We’re in the Money’, ‘Hooray for Hollywood!’, ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’).

It’s funny to see Christopher Plummer as the villain of the piece in the same year that The Sound of Music was released but he gives a boring, self-satisfied performance as Raymond Swan.  Plummer overdoes the prowling Mephistophelean suavity.  Swan mounts a big Christmas show to launch Daisy’s career and he appears on screen, in the theatre where the event is taking place, to introduce his new star.  Christopher Plummer is so intent on showing Swan’s heart of darkness that he deprives the man of the bogus bonhomie that would have been part of the secret of his success:  he’s too sinister (and, again, too modern-seeming).  It’s interesting to see Robert Redford making visible efforts to impress in this early film role.  (He’d done plenty on television and become a Broadway star in the original stage production of Barefoot in the Park but this was only his third credited movie appearance.)  Redford is somewhat uncomfortable with Wade Lewis’s verboseness (and, according to Wikipedia and other sources, was uneasy about the character’s sexuality too).  He handles the lines skilfully, though, and, with his intuitive camera sense and natural charisma, dominates every scene that he’s in.  Ruth Gordon, in the role of Daisy’s mother, relies on a distinctive delivery that succeeds in making her seem definitely crazier than anyone else in the story – and she’s touching when the mother emerges from the institution a quieter, more deeply confused figure.  As one of Swan’s acolytes, Roddy McDowall runs his boss a close second in sinisterness.  Thanks to his own Hollywood past, McDowall, like Natalie Wood, brings a weird extra layer to the character he’s playing.  He supplies a different illustration of the fate of the child star who grew up.

24 February 2016

[1] Natalie Wood did her own singing for Gypsy (1962), except for the higher notes, contributed by Marni Nixon.  Wood lip-synced to Nixon’s voice throughout in the previous year’s West Side Story.