Part
One (Campbell) |
Part Seven (Dan Sallitt) Maybe I'm just riffing on
the word "horror" here, but I've always thought that Preminger
created some of the most terrifying moments in movies: the shots in Angel
Face that start with the mundane and end with the cars flying
backwards toward the embankment; the sudden jet of flame that leaps at Saint
Joan at that film's climax. In
each case, the horror comes from rejecting the obligatory cut and holding
on to the frame so that the upheaval occurs within an unchanging visual
context. Nothing quite like that in Daisy, of course: the threat,
such as it is, emerges from Fonda's mild, perfectly lucid, perfectly
unknowable gaze, and from the suddenness with which loved ones become the
Other. Remember the way Peter Lapham overlooks Daisy's hostile reaction to
the mention of his wife, even changes the subject, then administers the
death blow after Daisy pushes him: "She's dead"?
That's Premingerian acting. To
similar effect, Dan O'Mara begins to panic as familiar Daisy transforms
into the unknowable: "You're going to marry him."
"I have married him."
The audience too has lost track of Daisy's movements at this point
in the film, as O'Mara has. I agree that Preminger
wouldn't have been comfortable with the structure of Janeway's novel, but
then few entertainment directors would have been: such an interior story
would be quite arty in a Hollywood context. Preminger is not alone among
the Hollywood greats in preferring to work from a base of story-driven
drama, and even melodrama. (Have you noticed how the characters in Daisy
refer to melodrama a few times? Hertz's script is mildly reflexive as a
light-hearted way of distancing itself from Hollywood cliche: "Bottom
of stairs symbolic of starting over again.") I ran across this Joan
Crawford quotation (from Conversations with Joan Crawford by Roy
Newquist) on the net: "If Otto Preminger hadn't directed it the
picture would have been a mess. The
script was cliche. The usual
triangle helped out by two very handsome young men, Dana Andrews and Henry
Fonda. It came off.
Sort of." The
literature is full of slighting comments like this.
What it is about this film that made its virtues so invisible to
contemporary observers? The
mind boggles. Perhaps Daisy has perplexed so many because it favors the rational in a culture that distrusts rationality, and gives the advantage to a passive strategy in a culture that celebrates action. Or are we confused that its dark, romantically flawed hero departs from his genre-determined fall and rise, and is revealed as an essentially joyful person fighting to get back to joy? What a concept. When one thinks about it, Preminger and Hertz betray so many of the tenets of romance drama that we can reasonably see Daisy as a refutation of that tradition rather than an exponent of it. Dan |
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