Talk about an extraordinary life......an actress who successfully navigated the choppy, poisonous waters of Hollywood through virtually her entire lifespan......from child star to teen star to young ingenue starlet to A-List leading lady.....
This film looked tailor-made for her......the rise and fall of a tough, streetwise delinquent plucked out of a beachside trailer shared with her addled mother and turned into an official Hollywood American Sweetheart by a Swan, a smoothly satanic studio boss. (Christopher Plummer).
Sounds like juicy, garish fun, huh? Uh.....no.
Directed with way too much fastidious good taste by Robert Mulligan ("To Kill A Mockingbird"), the movie respectfully plods along like a PBS 'Masterpiece Theater' depiction of rough 'n tumble 1930's tinseltown. This film comes as close to the Hollywood of that era as Earth is to Saturn.....
The actors all appear subdued and restrained, the bulk of their dialogue comes out sounding like obscure subtext. After a while, during our umpteenth yawn, we started to imagine what a director with an enthusiastic taste for lurid, trashy Hollywood storylines could have done with this material.......someone like Robert Aldrich, for example.....
(Truth is, we can imagine what Aldrich would do.....just watch "The Big Knife", "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" or "The Legend of Lylah Clare"......)
Mulligan is simply too much of a gentlemen artist to give this movie the propulsive melodramatic push it desperately needs.
And Plummer's 'Swan' character is the film's most ridiculous, unbelievable concoction....a studio mogul who's some kind of cultured patrician, a purring Devil who seems to have stepped out of a 'Twilight Zone' episode. Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck and Louis B.Mayer would no doubt laugh at the sight of this uppercrust high society swell supposedly running a movie studio.
Swan turns Natalie Wood's Daisy into a daft cross between Debbie Reynolds and one of the Our Gang kids, complete with attendant musical numbers......(by far the most entertaining moments in the film....)
It doesn't take Daisy long to figure out she's fallen into a nest of vipers.......and the script forces Wood to spend most of her screen time in reactive mode, widening her big brown eyes at the casual cruelties, foibles and immorality swirling around her.
Defying Swan by eloping with the studio's resident matinee idol Wade Lewis (Robert Redford) only hastens her downfall.......Wade isn't quite the....uh....man's man and Daisy soon finds herself having a meltdown while trapped in a dubbing booth.
None of this melodrama unfolds with much commitment.......you're left to imagine all the sinister machinations that Swan and his minions might be up to. Roddy McDowell, as Swan's assistant drips with barely contained malice.....but to what purpose, who knows? The movie's just too measured to delve into any of its characters.
The shining light here (and the single only reason this movie is worth watching for more than a minute, let alone its snail-like 2 hours)......Natalie Wood, feisty, in-your-face adorable and holding your attention through this indifferently directed movie through sheer charisma.
And that's what made her, until her untimely death by drowning, one of the last of the true movie stars. 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2) and consider all 2 & 1/2 stars strictly for her alone.
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