Daisy Miller. 1974. USA. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Screenplay by Frederic Raphael, based on the novella by Henry James. With Cybill Shepherd, Barry Brown, Cloris Leachman, Mildred Natwick, Eileen Brennan. DCP. 91 min.
After the impressive streak of The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973), Peter Bogdanovich was considered by many to be Hollywood's most charismatic new director and an heir to its golden-age masters (many of whom he championed as a critic). The win streak ostensibly ended with Daisy Miller, and Bogdanovich’s detractors wrote off the film as a dull vanity project made by overconfident media darlings: the director and his partner, Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich never regained his spark in Hollywood, but Daisy Miller (like some of his other later films) is an extraordinary tour-de-force. The film’s audacious mise-en-scène—and Shepherd’s remarkable performance as an independent-minded, flirty young American in Victorian high society—offers a modern rendition of the historical film genre and is clearly influenced by Orson Welles (who recommended Henry James’s novella to Bogdanovich). Daisy Miller's chilling ending reflecs life’s absurd transience and tragically foretells the director’s own personal tragedies.