Watched: Inside Daisy Clover

What a strange movie, even for 1965. Seeing as Natalie Wood was famous first for being an adorable child and then for her romantically girlish roles in Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story (all movies I love), it's interesting that this movie came out four years after WSS, right between Sex and the Single Girl and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (More on that later). It's definitely a movie with a purpose and something to say, and for the way that it plays with both the done-to-death meteoric rise and fall of the Hollywood star story and the romantic melodrama, I think I kind of loved it. Also, the male leads are young Christopher Plummer and Robert Redford. Swoon? Swoon.

So Wood plays Daisy Clover, this kind of bratty-tough tomboy who lives in a shack that is literally on the boardwalk with her crazy (Dementia? Alzheimer's? There's definitely something going on although it's never really pinned down. She's just kind of nuts.) mom, MAUDE! Okay, just kidding, it's Ruth Gordon playing what Maude would have been like if she hadn't met Harold and had instead had a couple daughters and gotten progressively weirder and crazier.

So Daisy actually is a pretty good singer, and sends a record to Swan Studios. They round her up for a screen test, and then decide to make her into a star. The first step of which includes institutionalizing Maude, making her formerly disinterested older sister her guardian, and giving Daisy the ol' Hollywood makeover. So then she's in a bunch of fairly stupid-looking musicals, becomes a huge star, falls in love with and marries fellow Swan Studios star Wade Lewis (Redford), finds out he's a total adulterer, a flake, and kinda gay, sleeps with Swan (Plummer), rescues her mom from the nuthouse, her mom dies, Swan tries to bully her into working again, she has a complete mental collapse, tries to kill herself, realizes she's way too awesome for suicide, and decides instead to fuck 'em all.

Some other stuff happens with Swan's super sad sack of a wife Melora (played with a lot of subtlety by Katharine Bard, who it would seem I have not seen in anything else, but who was great in this- her character is so overwhelmingly soft-spoken and sweetly maternal that when she inevitably bears her true colors it's kind of gut-wrenching) and Daisy's bitchy older sister, but that's the gist of it.

As you can probably tell from the photos there's also some "footage" from the so-called "Blockbuster musicals" Daisy's starring in. Like I said, they all look kind of stupid. But while the meta nature of the rise and fall of a star is not really a new story for Hollywood to tell, I think that aside from that one complaint, this one really tells it well. By pulling Daisy so abruptly from such a disadvantaged (but happy?) position, it makes her reluctance to be a star and growing horror at the compromises she has to make believable; as soon as her sister and the Swans are running the show you realize she never had a chance.

And her bouncing from half-hearted teen romance to terrible marriage with the secretly bisexual, adulterous Lewis to the openly adulterous, malevolent Swan is handled well too, as is the ensuing mental collapse when the Ol' Pal dies.

I am definitely one of those people who thinks that Natalie Wood was one of a kind, incredibly beautiful but still a really talented actress; especially when it comes to heartbreak. She did heartbreak so well. I watched Splendor in the Grass once, in tenth grade, and like Requiem for a Dream and The Stepford Wives (original), I thought it was an incredibly well-made, well-acted movie and I am glad I watched in once and that was enough for me. I was depressed for days. But getting back to Wood; she also had a good eye for movies. She made a pretty graceful transition into adult fare between Rebel and B&C&T&A, one that younger actresses could probably learn something from. This role definitely shows that awkward transition; Wood clearly isn't a young girl but she's still such a small woman that she plays the bravado and the vulnerability with equal skill. The movie is attacking Hollywood but also glorifying it, showing the subjugation of the studio system but also how it can protect people. It directly addresses the very issues Wood was probably dealing with, the move beyond adorable America's sweetheart. But beyond all this, and really I cannot stress this enough because after a somewhat morbid and subdued final half hour it is the fantastically anarchic untraditional ending, which has Daisy triumph on nobody's terms but her own, that sells this whole movie.

What.

I like that she takes her coffee cup with her. Because she's not going to give up a perfectly decent cup of coffee just because she's got a fiery, structure-damaging, consequences-be-damned point to make.

This a lot of beautiful for one screen, even with the ridiculously terrible Prince Valiant haircut.

Please stop.
When the studio head's wife is personally called in to lifelessly implore you to institutionalize your own mother and then tell people she died... run. Run away.

Maude is also a fortune teller, except she uses a regular pack of cards? And I'm pretty sure she says "Get ouuuuuuuuutta heeeeeere!" in her Ruth Gordoniest Ruth Gordon voice at least thrice.