Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Author:Quentin Tarantino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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