DAISY KENYON SYMPOSIUM
Published in 24fps, February 2004.
Part Three (Damien Bona)
It's
appropriate, Zach, that you call Daisy Kenyon "one of the
loneliest films" in terms of its reputation - which I think is
accurate - because the movie itself is very much about loneliness, or more
specifically, alone-ness. To me, the major theme of the movie
is the attempts of people to connect, a process which entails breaking
through various personal and societal barriers, barriers that exist in the
script and which are heightened by Otto Preminger's visuals.
Zach wrote, "Part of the aim of this symposium is either to debunk or
complicate the standard characterization of Preminger as a cold objective
omniscient presiding over his characters with limited interest."
I think the beautiful Daisy Kenyon shows beyond doubt that
Preminger was much more than the detached observer he is often tagged as.
In the film, he does not make moral judgments, but presents his characters
with great delicacy and feeling. (What is often cited as
"ambiguousness" regarding the people in Preminger's films
derives from the fact that they tend to be so emotionally complex and
multi-textured.) The viewer is able to identify with any and all of
the members of Daisy Kenyon's triumvirate but, as Dan wrote,
"Daisy, intelligent and balanced, is not a creature of power, and is
buffeted about by the superior strategy of her lovers." She is
the audience surrogate, and I can't think of another romantic film in
which it is so up in the air throughout which suitor will triumph (well,
maybe Wilder's "Sabrina," but that picture's narrative
development doesn't make a whole lot of sense) - and in Daisy you
can't even simply take the usual short-cut of seeing which actor received
higher billing. But the character of Daisy does know her two
men better than they know themselves.
Dan wrote that Dana Andrews's character's "joy is in his exercise of
power." An intriguing aspect of the movie is that for all
his professional and monetary success - and his self-satisfaction -
Andrews's Dan O'Mara is actually fairly ineffectual. He uses swagger
to intimidate his hapless father-in-law and to get a good table at the
Stork Club, but as a lawyer he loses the one case in his life that is of
any real import and as a father he doesn't protect his youngest daughter
from the abuse of his wife. He willingly relinquishes his duty to
safeguard his little girl because he's essentially a weakling. A
prisoner of his own passions, Dan's personal happiness takes precedence
over his familial obligations. And when he tries to use physical
force with the now-married Daisy, it is a fiasco and he ends up bloodied.
(It says a lot about Dana Andrews's ability as an actor and Preminger's
skill with performers that the character of Dan remains fairly charming
throughout.)
The counterpoint to Andrews's Dan not being as in control as he seems at
first blush is, of course, the strength that Henry Fonda's seemingly
feckless Peter eventually reveals. In terms of self-awareness,
Fonda's Peter tries to be the film's most articulate character, a sort of
semi-existentialist given to pronouncements such as explaining his
decision to stay in the Army after the war as "They changed Sixth
Avenue into something called Avenue of the Americas. It wasn't New
York. It wasn't home." And "The world's dead,
and everybody in it's dead but you." Yet, conversely he is much
less given to articulating directly his feelings about Daisy than is his
rival. Daisy insists she sees through Peter's angst, telling him
"If everything had gone dead for you, you wouldn't know it. You
wouldn't be sitting here trying to sound like a case history."
I like Dan's description of Peter's "two frequencies [that] are
superimposed upon each other." He is drunk when he tells Daisy
he is love with her, and it's also striking that when Daisy eventually
tells Peter she loves him, it's another unconventional visual set-up - the
two actors have their backs to us. During the gamesmanship
orchestrated by Andrews's character, Peter keeps things close to his vest
and we're never quite sure what he's thinking, what his strategy is.
Early on, he is incompetent as a suitor - he forgets the plans for a
second date, but he becomes devoted to Daisy because she indeed does cut
through his self-indulgence. Similarly, she also reveals to Dan that
what he proudly likes to believe is humility is actually self-pity.
Each of the three has his or her own elements of power, Daisy's being her
innate understanding of human (or, at least, male) nature.
Two things especially knocked me out watching Daisy Kenyon for a
second (and then third) time. One is how masterfully, with
judicious camera placement and movement, and the positioning of his
actors, Preminger created a sense of alone-ness among his characters.
He created the perfect visual language for a film in which, as Zach so
accurately put it, "on a narrative level every character is
hopelessly out of pace and place with the others." The first
time we see the eponymous character, she is very specifically set apart
from the others in the room, Dana Andrews and Martha Stewart (who plays
her model, Angelus); each of the three occupies an individual visual
plane. (This film may well constitute the best use of deep focus
photography I've seen; the cinematographer was Leon Shamroy). And
similarly, when we have our first look at Dan's home life, Preminger's
deep focus again is a separating mechanism. Dan is in the foreground
with his valet, while in the background down a hall and in another
room, his wife, Lucille (Ruth Warrick), is busy with a maid. Husband
and wife are then briefly together, but quickly move to separate rooms
while remaining in the frame, with Lucille chattering at Dan while he is
on the telephone, her yammering interfering with his conversation.
Everything we need to know about the state of this marriage is conveyed in
this one scene. (Traditionally, deep focus, such as when William
Wyler employed it, served to bring various characters together -
fascinating how Preminger's incisive blocking of his actors achieves just
the opposite). Throughout Daisy Kenyon, the placing of the
characters in separate spheres is a dominant visual device.
Andrews's Dan attempts to be part of a couple, to break down the
singleness of human existence, through his pursuit of Daisy. One recurring
motif which emphasizes Andrews search for a happy home life is the way he
immediately, almost instinctively, pours himself a cup of coffee when he
goes to Daisy's apartment - a stolen moment in imitation of normal
domesticity. Later, Dan's desperation becomes even more pronounced:
things between him and Daisy are at a low point and she doesn't allow him
inside, so Dan is reduced to drinking from the milk bottle in the hallway
outside her apartment.
One of the great moments in Daisy Kenyon for me is the phone call
between Dan and Daisy, in which he avers that his love for her is the most
important thing in his life. What makes the sequence so striking is that
Preminger gives the scene to Dan's wife, who listens in on the
conversation on another line. It is very telling that the
high-strung Lucille is not at all a sympathetic wronged-wife, but
watching her face reflect the sudden realization that her marriage has
been a charade is nevertheless absolutely chilling and heartbreaking.
A director who functioned simply as a clinical observer would not have
given this moment such heightened emotionalism. When Lucille speaks
up on the phone, there is a look of complete horror on Daisy face, and as
another example of individual solitariness in the movie, Angelus - now
Daisy's roommate - is seen in the background, calmly and obliviously
reading in bed.
The follow-through is equally amazing. As Dan angrily confronts Lucille -
he even talks of killing her - their troubled younger daughter, Marie
(Connie Marshall), suddenly appears, as if a specter, from the right hand
frame of the screen, her look of pure anguish a representation of the
O'Mara's miserable family life. Then Preminger uses a dolly shot to take
the moment away from Lucille and gives it to Dan as he walks away with his
two daughters. The execution of the scene is similar in effect to
the visuals mentioned in Dan's Point two: "it's very Preminger to
keep the 'I love you,' Daisy's modifying reaction to it, and Peter's
surprise departure all in the sameshot. More than anything, Preminger is
about using style to give a unified presentation of elements that are in
dramatic opposition to each other." Here. within one
take, Andrews's character transforms from enraged adulterer to loving
father, while Warrick's remains overwhelmed with anger and despair.
The idea of the separateness of each person is specifically spelled out in
the script when Daisy, bewildered and disoriented by her tangled situation
after Dan becomes free, says, "I have to be alone for a few
days." Zach wrote that the characters "articulate their
most private, latent emotions to each other," and by this point these
emotions have gotten so intense, confused and out-of-control that Daisy is
overwhelmed to the extent that her actions and reactions have become
almost primal. She orders Angelus to hang up the phone on Lucille, she
soon after herself hangs up on Dan when he tells her that he and Peter
have followed her to Cape Cod, and to escape the two men she goes to her
car as if in a trance.
I was also struck by Preminger's use of movement. The characters are
on the go, and a theme of the film is the striving to find a place - both
physical and emotional - of contentment (the difficulty of which is nicely
conveyed in short-hand by Peter's Avenue of the Americas remark) and
Preminger's camera is similarly in motion. The very first thing we see in
the film is a woman (an extra) walking briskly down West 12th Street in
front of Daisy's apartment and looking at her watch. Then a cab
pulls up and Dana Andrews gets out. He asks the driver to wait, but the
cabbie tells him "I can't wait" -- everyone's in transit in the
universe of Daisy Kenyon. When Dan enters Daisy's apartment,
the camera tracks from behind him, emphasizing his movement.
In this early scene inside Daisy's home, the two lovers have an argument
about a broken dinner engagement, and Daisy walks off to another part of
the apartment, leaving Dan off-camera. He re-enters the
frame, following Daisy as he tries to patch things up. As he exits the
building, he gets the cab in which Henry Fonda's Peter enters the movie
(with the object of their affection, Daisy, watching from her window
above.) Later in the film they have another taxi hand-off, an
indication of the integral role coming-and-going plays in their romantic
competition. (Another key moment involving a taxi comes when Dan,
intending to go home, inadvertently gives the driver Daisy's address.)
And when Peter made his first appearance at the apartment, he had to
follow Crawford into her bedroom. I think some of the tracking shots
in the film border on the Ophulsian.
The most pronounced example of movement in the picture is when Daisy is
driving recklessly - with David Raksin's music churning melodramatically -
as she tries to avoid her two men and ends up crashing. When
she gets out of the car, she's in a daze, struggling in the snow.
Preminger's camera pulls back to make her appear small, helpless and even
child-like. The film is suggesting that attempting to escape one's
fate is futile as Daisy is forced back to the house where Dan and Peter
await her. When she returns, they are playing cards - in a parody of
friendship - and Dan tells her, "Baby, you've got to stop running
away." Yet, ultimately, when Daisy rejects Dan, it is because,
she tells him, in pursuing her what he was actually doing was trying to
run away from responsibility. Deflated, the heretofore smug
Dan walks out of camera range one last time, leaving Daisy in the frame.
Preminger's visual scheme has remained consistent throughout.
By the way, I did a Google search for Elizabeth Janeway's novel, to see if
I could find a copy (it's nowhere to be found on eBay). Interestingly, the
book, which was published in 1945, has a subtitle: "An Historical
Novel of 1940-42."
--Damien