Inside Daisy Clover

I watched Inside Daisy Clover as part of my survey of the prominent films of 1965. It received a few Oscar nominations, notably for Ruth Gordon as Best Supporting Actress. But it is, quite simply, dreadful. The film offends taste at almost every level--badly acted, written, and directed.

The film was directed by Robert Mulligan, who also made To Kill a Mockingbird, but to look at his filmography that was kind of a fluke, as he mostly made bloated romances during the '60s. To judge from watching Inside Daisy Clover, it was directed by someone who has no sense of how to tell a story or pace one, either.

It's the cynical story of a young tomboy (Natalie Wood) in the 1930s who grows up in a beach town with her dotty mother (Gordon, who almost always played dotty). She dreams of becoming a star, and sends a record of herself singing to a movie studio head. He's Christopher Plummer, pretty much playing the same uptight prig as he was in The Sound of Music. He makes her a star, but also demands controlling every bit of her life, including putting her mother in a nursing home. With the help of a famous movie star (Robert Redford, in one of his first screen roles), she busts loose.

Okay, where to start? First of all, Wood was a talent, but she can't pull off being a 28-year-old playing a 15-year-old. She was doomed from the start. Secondly, Wood's voice is dubbed, as it was in West Side Story, but the voice actress is not that great. Third, the film's timeline is all screwed up. She seems to be making the same movie that has just recently came out to great acclaim. How many movies has she made? It all seems to be one about her joining the circus, and it looks horrible. And then there's the relationship between Wood and Redford. Plummer points out to Redford that she's "jailbait," so Redford marries her, which is just as creepy. I suspect they didn't go with an actual teenager because it would have been a pedophile's dream.

Redford's character is a closeted homosexual, and Inside Daisy Clover is notable for having the first gay character who is not ashamed, disgraced, or suicidal. That is to be commended, but it's too bad it's in this horrible movie.