Culture Shock

By JAY COCKS

DAISY MILLER

Directed by PETER BOGDANOVICH

Screenplay by FREDERIC RAPHAEL

This adaptation of one of Henry James' shortest and most popular works contains, in cameo, a theme that winds through more elaborate novels like The Ambassadors: the ineluctable tension between European and American cultures that leads to corruption. What Peter Bogdanovich's movie is mostly about, however, is flirting.

Great chunks of dialogue and narration have been lifted from the book, like so many concrete blocks, and deposited onto the screen. They arrange themselves as a series of hurdles, which the actors negotiate with disheartening lack of success. James found his drama in nuance and inference, in the risky currents of society which can warm or chill in their natural course. When James' people talk about being invited to a salon or about being cut off, they are employing the author's own intricate metaphor--performing a ritual of crucial selection. Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael (Darling), have swept out all the undertone from Jamesian society, trying instead to make high drama out of mere social graces. It is a little like trying to wring a sonnet out of a bill of fare.

The story concerns the great consternation brought about in Continental society by the appearance of Daisy Miller (Cybill Shepherd), a rich American girl touring Europe with her mother (Cloris Leachman) and bratty little brother (James McMurtry). Daisy flirts openly with a gaudy Italian opportunist, causing something of a scandal, while teasing an upright young American expatriate named Winterbourne (Barry Brown). The latter observes, with a mixture of melancholy and enchantment, her flouting of convention, and feels drawn to her. Daisy eventually catches "the Roman fever" late at night in the Colosseum, and dies of the figurative effects of culture shock.

Among all the flaws in this movie--the numbing literalness, the flagrant absence of subtlety--nothing is quite so wrong as Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich installed her in the lead as if she were some sort of electrical appliance being plugged into an outlet. Shepherd has a home-fried hauteur good enough for the one-dimensional roles she played in The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid. She knows how to strike poses for the camera (she used to be a fashion model, after all), but she has no resources as an actress. She runs short of breath in the middle of lines, and gives no appearance of understanding the words she blurts out in little hiccups. Daisy is supposed to be unspoiled, cunning and callow--and blithely attractive. Shepherd projects instead a taunting sexual hostility that turns Daisy into a little bitch goddess on a pedestal.

Most of the actors behave with the sort of animation generally reserved for lyings-in-state, although Cloris Leachman's Mrs. Miller is skittish and well observed. Bogdanovich, a hugely eclectic director, borrows heavily here again. The use of a popular tune--Maggie, in this instance--as a sort of sentimental signature comes directly from John Ford, and the mood of much of the light-comedy moments seems a gloss on Ernst Lubitsch. The film's opening is quite ravishing, however--the early moments of a hotel stirring for a new day--and throughout there is a kind of stylistic steadiness new to Bogdanovich.

Someone says of Daisy Miller that "she did what she liked." Bogdanovich seems to be following that rather wayward course too. There is always the feeling with him that he is really better than he is showing us. But the further he gets from his kinetic first film, Targets, the more fragile that hope seems. . Jay Cocks

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