INSIDE DAISY CLOVER 1965 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2013/07/inside-daisy-clover-1965.html
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 encounter it again as an adult and find yourself at a complete loss to know just what it was that captured your imagination in the first place. Had this post been written in 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-inconcept (but veering towards camp in execution), very '60s look at '30s 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 (this was years before the days of the celebrity tell-all and 24-hour, peel-back-theveneer, Hollywood infonews) to be a bold inversion of the usual rags-to-riches story. So, after many years, when the opportunity arose to finally get a look at Inside Daisy Clover in color, digitallyrestored and widescreen, I couldn't pass it up. I should have left things as they were.
Natalie Wood as Daisy Clover
Robert Redford as Wade Lewis
1/9
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 factory that systematically exploits talent, treats people like property, and callously discards those 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 as the target of all this abuse, a teenage child star. That is, 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 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
2/9
about '60s period films, one so pervasive I should by now accept it as a given (yet can’t)-'60s movies are notorious for always looking like the '60s, no matter what era they try to depict. Inside Daisy Clover takes the trouble of changing the novel’s 1950s setting to Hollywood in the 1930s, but outside of a few vintage automobiles thrown at us, there's precious little effort made to advance period authenticity. I know it’s partly a matter of aesthetics…'30s standards of beauty (pencil thin eyebrows, narrow silhouettes, 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, it merely looks lazy, cheap, and uncommitted. The anachronistic rendering of the era prevented me from being fully drawn into the story, and gives this drama the unintended look of light comedy. Compare Inside Daisy Clover’s superficial, overlit sheen to the 1930s as depicted 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 and shook things up
Former child stars Natalie Wood and Roddy McDowall McDowall appears in the thankless role of 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 (overacted, perhaps), yet little of what happens feels particularly true-to-life. Part of it's due to the acting, which seldom moves beyond the surface, the other falls heavily on the writing. Everything grim seems to have been unnecessarily pitched to melodrama (Plummer’s Swan is only lacking a top hat, cape, and a handlebar mustache to twirl), and that which should be moving, feels under-directed and under-performed. Daisy's frequent outbursts and eruptions of temper have all the requisite sound and fury, but there’s no anguish behind it…Natalie Wood's one-note performance turns a young girl’s pain into a series of shrill tantrums.
3/9
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 first I saw it as a kid. Now Natalie's histrionics are overshadowed by the inspired sound editing, which is really quite marvelously done.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM For reasons that make sense only to myself, 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 pintsized 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 Patty Duke, at age 19, would certainly have made a more persuasive 15-year-old. Not to mention the fact that Duke’s less glamorous, tomboyish looks are much more appropriate to the character than Wood’s angular, inescapably mature and feminine countenance. In addition, Duke’s speaking voice has the naturally low register and raspy edge Natalie Wood works hard (far too hard) to capture in the early scenes.
4/9
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) to be 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 here 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 which recall or inadvertently reference Patty Duke’s legendarily comic performance. There’s the laughable adopting of “little toughie” postures to convey defiance; the cornball, climbing-the-ladder-of success montages; the rebellious bristling at authority; the theatrical mental breakdowns and self-destructive behavior; the barely adequate dubbed singing that’s nevertheless hailed by any and all to be the stuff of which stars are made; and, best of all, Daisy’s and Neely’s songs were penned by the exact same composers: Dory & Andre Previn— two people who never heard a Vegasstyle 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 in 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
5/9
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 a characterization we’re given a too-mature actress in '60s false eyelashes and eyeliner, trying too hard to convey spirited adolescence by means of cartoonishly-rendered explosions of piss and vinegar feistiness. An actress I've always felt could deliver with a strong director, Natalie Wood during the film's first ten minutes displays some of the most amateurish acting I've ever seen outside of a John Waters or Andy Warhol film. She's downright embarrassing, and the film takes a long time to regain its footing. She gets better once she gets to drop the butch act, but not by much. I'm not sure if it's one of the worst performances of her career, but it's pretty darn close.
Ruth Gordon was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Daisy's (what else?) eccentric mother. To be fair, this was Gordon's return to the screen after a 22-year absence, and at the time 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—that make his scenes the most lively in the movie. The same can't be said for gorgeous superstar-to-be Robert Redford, whose 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 granted the songs You're Gonna Hear from Me and The Circus is a Wacky World. Cheesy, camp, and anachronistic as hell, these numbers (staged by Funny Girl's Herbert Ross) are nevertheless a lot of guilty-pleasure fun for a guy raised on variety shows from the
6/9
'60s and '70s.
"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 selfaggrandizing show-biz anthems beloved of pop stars and Vegas lounge singers in the sixties. Obligingly, and with an obvious eye towards a Best Song Oscar nod, or at least a Robert Goulet single, composers Dory and Andre Previn keep the musical arrangement snappy and thoroughly mired in mid-'60s Easy Listening tastes. In 2003, Barbra Streisand covered this song on her The Movie Album, but she kinda made it sound like a threat.
7/9
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. Happily, as this little ditty runs a marathon around your head 24/7, fans of the film will be granted the opportunity of reenacting Daisy's nervous breakdown scene for friends and family. 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 (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) might be the result of how much had to be left out. That being said, it’s still unlikely that Inside Daisy Clover would ever register with me again the way 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—are rather tame without good performances and writing to back it up.
Character actor and vaudevillian song and dance man Paul Hartman (best known as Emmett the handyman on The Andy Griffith Show) seen here with Natalie Wood in a deleted scene. Most likely from the film-within a film "Dime Store Kid."
Katharine Bard is really rather good as Raymond's Swan's neglected wife, Melora. There are better screen caps I could have used of her, but the evershaggable Robert Redford is just so darn cute here
On the plus side, I must say that Inside Daisy Clover looks rather spectacular in widescreen and in color, still, I'm not so sure that balances out having to face the fact that a movie I once liked a great deal just didn't stand the test of time for me.
8/9
THE AUTOGRAPH FILES: Copyright Š Ken Anderson
Christopher Plummer I got this autograph of back in 1983 when I was studying dance in New York. I saw him 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 ďŹ rst word preceding "...of best wishes" in the autograph above. As I recall, he was very nice, very tan (this was dead of winter) and VERY handsome!
9/9