Word: bogdanovich
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...with all of its attendant splendour and graceful, but inevitably brutish, carelessness. Farrow maintains a delicate balance between a gay childishness with her illicit lover, Gatsby, and a wanton callousness, a total disregard for anybody's feelings. Henry James's novella, Daisy Miller, adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich, is a portrait of exactly that kind of woman. But Cybill Shepherd's performance is slightly more questionable. In fact, the whole movie is questionable, like one of James's long spiralling sentences, full of commas, semicolons, and dashes--seemingly interminable. Bogdanovich's problem is that he can't capture...
...what Bogdanovich has done to the novel in his film in one sentence, it would have to be a line uttered in absolute disgust about Daisy's flirtations and how they violate expected sex roles: "A man may know every one, men are welcome to that privilege." The implication is that Daisy may certainly not know everyone, and Bogdanovich sets out to exploit the underlying sexual currents of this statement. One of the mysterious qualities of James's novella is the question of Winterbourne's motives. At the very beginning there are intimations of an illicit relationship between...
...character of Mrs. Walker, the dominant figure in Rome's exclusive American circle. She is a kind of bridge between high society and the real world. Instead of rejecting Daisy outright, as all of her uppity friends do, she tries to save the young girl's precariously balanced reputation. Bogdanovich turns this worldy-wise matron into a more raw, sensual character with hints of an affair just ending between her and Winterbourne. Admittedly, Eileen Brennan's performance as the feline Mrs. Walker is very convincing. However, to pull it off completely, the film has to enlarge another character from...
...Frankly, James wouldn't have stood for him; the sexual undertones are too explicit. No, James leaves those doors through which two people walk to the imagination of the reader. He gives you the gossip, and from there, it depends on how perverse or vivid your imagination is. Bogdanovich's is depraved: he makes Winterbourne's feeble mobility into a hypocritical desire for Daisy...
...trifles. Here is a perfectly good story, James's first popular success made for the first time into a movie. Eventually it has to be dealt with on its own terms. And these terms are, for the most part, non-cinematic in the avante-garde sense of the word. Bogdanovich sticks strictly to the traditional narrative film, so much so that editing is kept to a minimum. Instead he prefers smooth transitions within scenes: the long-shot, dolly-in and pan. The colors are rich, almost too opulent--the Victorian chambers begin to blend into each other in a boring...