Cinema Speculation

Daisy Miller

(1974)

A lot of the American Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs tried their hand at adapting great authors of literature and theatre. Mike Nichols with Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, and Jules Feiffer. Frank Perry adapted Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. Arthur Penn did Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man. Paul Mazursky did a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story. Hal Ashby did Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. Richard Rush’s magnum opus was Paul Brodeur’s darkly comic novel of paranoia The Stunt Man. And Richard Lester’s magnum opus would be his brilliant slapstick comedy reinvention of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (which I believe is one of the greatest epic film productions ever made).

And their European counterparts would go even further. John Schlesinger would adapt Thomas Hardy and Nathanael West. Roman Polanski would adapt Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy. Franco Zeffirelli would build his career adapting Shakespeare. Milos Forman would adapt Ken Kesey, E. L. Doctorow, and a truly awful version of Ragni and Rado’s Hair. Ken Russell would do his Ken Russell number on D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley (not to mention all those pseudo-biopics of great composers).

However, when the Movie Brats adapted novels, they leaned more towards popular fiction (The Godfather, Jaws, The Last Picture Show, Carrie, Paper Moon, The Fury). This would change in the eighties and nineties, when all the Movie Brats took a turn for the highbrow. Scorsese would adapt Edith Wharton, Spielberg would adapt J. G. Ballard and Alice Walker, Coppola would tackle Bram Stoker’s most famous creation, Paul Schrader would adapt Mishima and direct Harold Pinter, and De Palma would fall on his face and never really get back up again after fucking up Tom Wolfe.*

But, back in the seventies, the only one of them to—straight up—tackle classic literature was Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of Henry James’ Daisy Miller (yes, I’m aware that Michael Pye doesn’t count Bogdanovich as a Movie Brat. But I do).

What sets Bogdanovich’s adaptation apart from Far from the Madding Crowd or Tess or The Europeans or The Age of Innocence or the whole Masterpiece Theatre vibe of most classic literary film adaptations is the director’s approach. He tries to turn the first half of the film into a comedy. Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller goes for and achieves a rapid-fire pace of overlapping Hawksian comedic rhythm to the dialogue. Does that just mean he has the characters talking fast?

Yes.

But Peter had a facility with overlapping (non-improvised) comedic dialogue like none of his peers (it wouldn’t be till Bob Clark, in his Porky’s movies, showed such a similar talent). But admittedly, the film starts off a little bizarre. The tone of the opening scene between Barry Brown’s Winterbourne and Daisy’s nine-year-old brother Randolph (James McMurtry) is a little off-putting. You see what Peter is trying to accomplish, but you’re not sure it’s going to work.

But the film gains power as it progresses and builds to a gut-punch ending. Bogdanovich’s film is very funny, yet it leaves a viewer profoundly sad as you watch the final credits fade up.

Peter made a film like the breezy and entertaining literary classic adaptations that came out of Hollywood in the thirties and forties. Garbo’s Anna Karenina and Camille, Charles Laughton’s The Hunchback of Norte Dame, Ronald Colman’s A Tale of Two Cities, Laurence Olivier’s Wuthering Heights. Peter tackled the material similarly to the way he imagines his hero Howard Hawks might tackle the assignment in the forties (though there is a level of photographic beauty that would have completely eluded Hawks). Peter even made it for the same reason Hawks would have probably made it. Not because he’s overly reverential to Henry James’ source material, but because Henry James’ source material offered a great star vehicle for Cybill Shepherd (you can imagine Hawks doing it with Frances Farmer).

It’s true that Bogdanovich did overestimate Cybill Shepherd’s talents. But one of the talents she did possess was a facility with rapid-paced comedic Hawksian dialogue. Shown off to good effect in both Daisy Miller and the non-singing scenes in At Long Last Love. As well as her scenes with Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver and Ivan Passer’s Silver Bears, leading to her spectacular eighties comeback on the smash hit TV show Moonlighting.

Shepherd is completely convincing as Daisy Miller. But not convincing like a classic actress playing the role, which is what we’re accustomed to seeing when we usually watch classic literature dramatized (Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress). By Bogdanovich turning the whole story into one that turns on fast-paced comic repartee, he leans the material into Shepherd’s strengths.

But it seems that Bogdanovich also went for a duality of character and actress. Like the cheeky innocent Daisy is in over her head in high society expatriate Rome, Cybill is in over her head in this lavish period production.

But Shepherd, like Miller, rises to the occasion.

Shepherd shares with Miller her delight in slight inappropriateness, her sarcastic sense of humor, and her ability to manipulate men to act out her whims. She also possesses Daisy’s American “fuck you, Jack” rebellious streak, what used to be called moxie. It’s that “fuck you, Jack” quality that makes Daisy reject Mrs. Walker’s (Eileen Brennan) demand to fall in line and get in her society coach. It’s a decision that effectively ends Daisy’s life in English expatriate Roman high society, and ultimately leads to her death.

Shepherd demonstrated that same “fuck you, Jack” spirit by taking on Henry James’ heroine in a lavish starring vehicle for herself directed by her boyfriend. Both Miller and Shepherd share a consequences-be-damned moxie. But where that moxie in Daisy leads to tragedy, Shepherd, after a settling-in period during the first fifteen minutes, grows into the role (even Pauline Kael had to begrudgingly admit that. Something you could never imagine Kael doing for other of Shepherd’s ilk, like Ali MacGraw or Candice Bergen).

In Bogdanovich’s telling, Daisy’s fate is sudden, and we have an emotional reaction to both its abruptness and callousness.

And that reaction is earned by Cybill Shepherd’s affinity with Daisy Miller. The ending leaves you shocked and sad at its conclusion, over the fate of a character you’re never really sure you liked.

The conclusion also contains a real-life resonance.

And that’s the sad fate of the film’s male lead, Barry Brown, playing the American Frederick Winterbourne, who chases after Daisy and tells her story to us.

Barry Brown was a young actor who emerged in the late sixties and early seventies, popping up on The Mod Squad and Ironside, and small parts in movies like Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. He was also, along with Jeff Bridges and Rob Reiner, one of the fraidy cat white kids bussed to the scary black high school in Paul Bogart’s Halls of Anger.

He was an Andrew Prine–type of leading man.

Skinny, handsome, sensitive, and soft.

A male ingenue.

Brown was also, surprisingly enough, a genre film scholar who wrote regularly for the horror film magazines Castle of Frankenstein (the Fangoria of the late sixties and early seventies) and Magick Theatre. Including, in Castle of Frankenstein issue #10, a wonderful piece that chronicles Bela Lugosi’s descent into morphine addiction.

But in 1972 Bonnie and Clyde screenwriter Robert Benton made his directorial debut with the western Bad Company, and he cast Barry Brown opposite Jeff Bridges as the film’s two leads.

Brown and Bridges proved a great team. Bridges, all rawboned American farm boy masculinity, and Brown his sensitive and intellectual opposite number.

Then Bogdanovich cast him as Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, the film’s real lead, and our witness to Daisy’s comings and goings (it probably didn’t hurt that Brown resembled Bogdanovich). Peter had his problems with Brown (mostly due to alcohol), but no matter, it’s still one of the finest performances in all of Bogdanovich’s filmography.

Cybill Shepherd’s biggest hurdle in the film is—in this period piece—fighting against her natural modernness. But in this story, that’s not the worst thing, because in the world that Daisy tries to cavort in, she’s considered outlandishly modern. But Barry Brown, along with Eileen Brennan, is the most era-appropriate actor in the film. He enters the movie like he stepped out of a Chagall painting to start the story. A painting he will return to once the story is over.

We watch Daisy yank Winterbourne’s leash, and we watch him hop.

We watch him try breathlessly to keep up with Daisy, and never quite succeed.

We watch him be enchanted by her liberated spirit . . . till he’s not.

And then, we watch him betray her.

And it’s only in that final shot that the loss and the cost of that betrayal is felt by us and Winterbourne, all left devastated by it.

What did it all mean?

What was Daisy to him, and what will she be?

Will she just turn into a story he tells?

How will Daisy fare in that story?

Who will Winterbourne be in that story?

Is Winterbourne the only one—save her mother and little brother—to care enough to tell Daisy’s story?

The question that Barry Brown’s performance asks the audience to contemplate is, will Winterbourne be haunted by his encounter with Daisy Miller, or will her memory become insignificant over time?

After Daisy Miller Brown never received another lead in studio movies (but he is the lead of a tremendously entertaining ski thriller, directed by the underrated Robert Butler, titled The Ultimate Thrill).

For the most part, Brown returned to television in the late seventies doing guest shots on TV programs like Police Woman and Barnaby Jones. Though he did have a good part in Joe Dante’s seminal Jaws rip-off for New World Pictures, Piranha.

Then, the year of that film’s release, at the age of twenty-seven, Barry Brown took his own life. Turning all of us who liked Barry Brown, when we watch the end of Daisy Miller, into Winterbourne.

Who was Barry Brown?

What did it all mean?

Am I the only one who remembers Barry Brown?

Am I enough?