Inside Daisy Clover (1965): Directed by Robert Mulligan, Starring Natalie Wood

When I read that movie director Robert Mulligan had died, I checked the Internet Movie Database to see how many of his films I had seen. (I remembered that Mulligan directed To Kill a Mockingbird, and I was sure there were other movies of his I'd seen, but I couldn't remember which.)

I was a little surprised at how many of Mulligan's films I'd seen. Mulligan was one of those filmmakers—like Sidney Pollack and Norman Jewison—who got his start directing live TV drama in the 1950s and switched to making films. Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They; The Way We Were), Jewison (. . . And Justice for All, A Soldier's Story), and Mulligan were all drawn to “social issue” films. Or maybe producers with “social issue” films were drawn to them.

Directing the kind of TV drama that Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky wrote was good training for making the kind of personal, common-man stories moviegoers wanted to see in the 1950s and 60s. Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, about a slob in love, and Rod Serling's Patterns, about a business executive's psychological crisis, were themselves turned into theatrical films.

Director Robert Mulligan

Robert Mulligan's “message pictures” included To Kill a Mockingbird (about a girl growing up amid racism in the South) and Up the Down Staircase (Sandy Dennis playing a teacher in a failing urban school) and were both based on best-selling novels.

One of Mulligan's movies that stayed with me is Inside Daisy Clover, like To Kill a Mockingbird the story about a young woman growing up, and one of the most interesting films of Natalie Wood's career. It's also one of the best movies about Hollywood.

Around the same time she made good films like Inside Daisy Clover, Wood also played the ingenue in several trashy time-wasters. In Bombers B-52 she was a sergeant's daughter who falls in love with an officer who loves his airplane more than her. In The Great Race she was a distraction for Tony Curtis as he drove around the world, taking too long.

Grown-up Natalie Wood Distracts Tony Curtis in The Great Race

Mulligan had already directed Wood in Love with the Proper Stranger in 1963, where she played a girl who found herself “in trouble” by Steve McQueen. (It's interesting how women back then found “themselves” in trouble, as if getting pregnant were like using a reflexive verb.)

Inside Daisy Clover is the story of rise and fall (and rise) of a 1930s child star who resembles, but isn't, Judy Garland. In fact, Daisy Clover is the antithesis to Judy Garland's character Esther Blodgett from A Star Is Born. (I prefer the 1937 version with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, directed by William Wellman, to the 1954 musical with Judy Garland and James Mason. The Janet Gaynor movie also makes for a more interesting comparison to Inside Daisy Clover.)

Both films are concerned with America and its fascination with Hollywood and stars. These movies aren't just about the star's tribulations. They're about the audience's need. The slogan “Go West” predates the cinema.

In 1937, Janet Gaynor as Esther Blodgett tells her grandmother she has to get out of the Midwest and go to Hollywood. (She isn't driven to be an artist, just to become a star. After all, girls in the movie magazines she reads do it.)

Rather than slap her and tell her about life, grandma relates how she came out from the East on a covered wagon and built a farm and fought Indians and buried grandpa. For grandma, Esther going to Hollywood is like her making a life on the prairie decades ago.

We know the story before we've even seen it. Esther becomes a star, finds love, loses love, becomes an even bigger star, and on the night of the Academy Awards walks down the red carpet with grandma—who has flown to the Coast (covered wagons are so 19th-century) and is wearing a mink for God's sake! Grandma—who in the first scene looked like a character in the Western TV series Wagon Train—now looks like a socialite. Now grandma is part of Esther's entourage.

There are lessons here about fame and the value of struggle, but I'm not sure they're the ones that director William Wellman meant to convey. Or maybe the movie says exactly what Hollywood wants to tell us about itself. (Wellman also directed the Western film Buffalo Bill, a story about show business that tries to retell the myths that everybody wants to believe in, but it can't quite lie convincingly enough.)

The young woman Daisy Clover (as depicted in the screenplay Gavin Lambert wrote from his novel) is a lot smarter than Esther Blodgett, even though they both exist in the movie 1930s. Lambert later wrote a biography of his friend Natalie Wood, and may have conceived Inside Daisy Clover with Wood in mind. So who else could play Daisy really?

Daisy calls her mother (played by Ruth Gordon) The Dealer. The Dealer brought Daisy up on a boardwalk on the fringes of show business. The Dealer isn't all there any more, but Daisy loves her in a way Esther doesn't seem to feel for most of her family. But, like Esther, Daisy doesn't accept the hand she's been dealt. She too goes to Hollywood.

Daisy Clover is not naïve and doesn't need warnings about the kind of men to stay away from. She goes to Hollywood, gets into pictures, working at movie mogul Raymond Swan's studio (“where there are more stars than in the heavens”), and becomes America's sweetheart. (The big musical number is “You're Gonna Hear from Me!”) Daisy becomes Hollywood's biggest star, with a detour for marriage to a closeted gay actor (played by Robert Redford) and a nervous breakdown. Christopher Plummer plays Swan with the same contempt producers have for their audiences today. (The Dark Knight as art? Please.)

Director Robert Mulligan made movies about common (in the nonpejorative sense) people: teachers, lawyers, and blue-collar workers. Even his movie about a movie star is the story of a woman whose job is to be loved by millions. There is no pretense that she deserves to be loved by millions, or than we're anything other than self-deluding fools for wanting her.

The Child Star