Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
again cuts on a line change—finally giving Daisy a close-up of her own when she sings the next lines. The slight distancing effect of the long lens indicates that we are seeing Daisy from Winterbourne’s enthralled point of view.
Up to this point, Daisy has been looking in the distance, singing to no one in particular, but on the word daisies in the song, she glances toward Winterbourne, and the heavens melt. A very tight close-up of Winterbourne confirms that his eyes and Daisy’s have met. Their largely unspoken longing for each other is elegantly evoked in this beautiful ballet of glances.
To watch an entire film made up of such carefully worked-out moments spoiled other films for me—they seemed so slovenly by comparison. When Pauline Kael compared Robert Altman’s Nashville (a great film, no doubt) to a movie orgy, she meant it as a compliment, but what is an orgy but messy and unruly—and so is Nashville. Looking at an Altman film after a Bogdanovich film is akin to opening your mouth underwater in a swimming pool: too much, too fast.
In hindsight, though, it is no mystery why Daisy Miller broke the streak that began with The Last Picture Show, accelerated with What’s Up, Doc?, and concluded with Paper Moon. Although Daisy Miller was warmly reviewed in the New York Times (critic Vincent Canby called it “something of a triumph for everyone concerned”), and decades later it was included in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,38 the film lacked the obvious commercial appeal of Bogdanovich’s earlier films. It featured a much less sympathetic group of characters, too. In fact, Winterbourne is flat-out unlikeable—a milksop who is constitutionally incapable of seizing the day. Daisy, of course, is loveliness personified, and, as played by Shepherd, she is not merely a rogue commoner from across the ocean. She has manners, curtsying primly after singing “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” and her hesitation in blatantly pursuing Winterbourne speaks to her propriety.
At the film’s end, Daisy is taken ill and perishes, further dimming its box-office chances. Yet the story’s tragic turn inspired some of Bogdanovich’s finest filmmaking. After learning that Daisy is ailing, Winterbourne enters the lobby of her hotel. The camera stays outside, observing the action that follows through a lace curtain hanging on a door. Winterbourne is halfway up the stairs when a desk clerk rushes over to tell him the news about Daisy—well, we assume that’s what he tells him. We can’t be certain because the voices are drowned out by Verdi’s “La donna e mobile,” which is being played by an organ grinder somewhere off-camera. Shell-shocked, Winterbourne turns around and walks toward us, opening the door with the lace curtain and letting it swing quietly back into place.
Just one scene later, Winterbourne is seen standing calmly—too calmly—above Daisy’s grave. He even manages to look her intuitive younger brother (James McMurtry—son of Larry) in the eye. In fact, Bogdanovich seems more affected by the situation than Winterbourne. He grasps, as Winterbourne never will, the gravity of losing a woman like Daisy Miller. The director’s camera flees the scene, receding from the graveyard until everything grows dim in a cloud of white smoke—which could easily be mistaken for Daisy’s spirit. “I’m a classicist,” Bogdanovich told critic Rex Reed, stating the obvious. “I like well-made films with beginnings, middles and ends, in which acting and writing are important instead of camera angles.”39 He seemed to delight in needling his contemporaries for their devotion to faddish film techniques. “I’m afraid it’s largely a twentieth-century critical fashion to value originality as the main criterion of a work of art,” he wrote in the early 1970s.40
Some saw such proclamations as signs of his arrogance, but they were, in truth, merely indicators of his self-assurance. From watching the great films and studying what it was that made them great, he trained himself how to make them. “I think that Peter had so much confidence,” Louise Stratten told me, “and that he had such a knowing from a very young age of what he wanted to do and that he was so brilliant at it that he could direct things with his left hand and backwards and with his eyes shut. He could direct circles around so many people.”
That confidence—particularly in his ability to tell a story with visuals alone—led him to decline the services of film composers on all but a handful of his films: his images would sink or swim on their own. In the most literal sense of the word, there is a lot of silence in his films. Instead of a full orchestra, we hear the wind in The Last Picture Show and the hubbub of a big city in They All Laughed. The penultimate scene in Saint Jack is startlingly quiet—in the hush of a balmy Singapore night, one man follows another, and the scene’s tension is heightened a hundredfold by the absence of extraneous sound effects or ambient noise, let alone music. And perhaps the pivotal scene in The Cat’s Meow depicts two characters playing a game of charades—silently acting out their feelings for each other.
At the same time, Bogdanovich will find almost any excuse for his characters to listen to the radio or to play a record, allowing him to gracefully fudge his “no music” rule. When watching his films, you stop counting the number of times a car whizzes by and music briefly blasts from a rolled-down window. But the music is fleeting, coming and going with the car, achieving the desired effect (a musical comment on a scene without resorting to a score) ever so quickly.
He occasionally uses the same device to nonmusical ends, as in the first shot of his expertly crafted made-for-television sequel to To Sir, with Love, which no less an authority than hard-to-please New York magazine television critic John Leonard described as “a bad idea that turned into a pretty good TV movie.”41 In the opening shot of To Sir, with Love II, a taxi-cab carrying Sidney Poitier pulls up and idles in front of the camera just long enough for us to hear a snatch of a radio broadcast: “This is Peter MacIntosh for the BBC in London. The weather forecast today ….” The words fade as Poitier’s cab drives away, but the locale of the first scene in the film has been clearly and quickly established.
Then came the flops.
Referring to the films that followed Bogdanovich’s earlier trio of triumphs, critic David Thomson once wrote, “Three-in-a-row struck back,”42 and so they did in the form of Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon. Sure, these films had their stray defenders—Daisy Miller, as noted, was admired by several important critics; At Long Last Love eventually accumulated a devoted following, including Roger Ebert and Woody Allen; and Nickelodeon did acceptable business. But what of the man who just a few years earlier had made millions laugh and cry?
Well, he was there, all right, and that was part of the problem: At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon, in particular, were the most personal projects he had yet undertaken, the former his first original screenplay since Targets and the latter his long-promised story of filmdom’s origins. They were inward-looking films, not readily accessible to the masses in the manner of their predecessors, but if some audiences yawned, that didn’t make these films any less revealing.
Set in the Manhattan of the 1930s, At Long Last Love uses the songs of Cole Porter—including “You’re the Top,” “From Alpha to Omega,” and “Find Me a Primitive Man”—to tell of the romantic dalliances of four strangers whose paths cross: an idle scion (Burt Reynolds), an heiress with a cash-flow problem (Cybill Shepherd), an Italian émigré who has come to America to make a million (Duilio Del Prete), and a brassy singer (Madeline Kahn). The film unfolds in a succession of nightclubs, country clubs, movie palaces, and palatial estates. Some of the characters are better off than others, as fortunes are made, lost, and reacquired over the course of the story, and the emphasis on the finer things in life is undeniable. The stock-market crash is treated as comic fodder, and the lower orders are represented almost exclusively by an indecorous maid (Eileen Brennan), a straight-laced butler (John Hillerman), and an acerbic doorman (M. Emmet Walsh), none of whom seems to be sweating it.
The sets and costumes—rendered in inky black-and-white by production designer Gene Allen and costume designer Bobbie Mannix, but photographed in creamy color by László Kovács—resemble a live-action version of a cartoon panel by Peter Arno of the New Yorker. For some viewers, the results were unappealing. Critic Barry Putterman, in an otherwise sympathetic account of Bogdanovich’s career in the