Kenyon Review

I had seen Daisy Kenyon two, maybe three times on video before catching it at MoMA. It's one of my very favorite films.

As a general rule (there are exceptions) I loathe going to see melodramas or noirs in public. My experience just never jibes with the vocal majority, who chuckle and guffaw throughout any number of lines they perceive as too "quaint," or which they perceive as howlers. I can even sympathize (though not empathize so much) with this kind of behavior when we're looking at a given film as a relic of the slightly older or outmoded idiocies of the past (even as these same audiences might be loathe to laugh at contemporary idiocies)--such as a film that insists on its women characters being housewives and mothers to be happy, or some such nonsense. (But this does not describe Daisy Kenyon, a film with a very strong female character based on a novel by a feminist writer and agitator that explicitly problematizes and dramatizes the attempts of its three-dimensional male characters to pigeonhole and control its three-dimensional female protagonist.)

Assuming a certain baseline of good manners (keep talking to a quiet mininum, turn off cell phones, don't get into fistfights), I think people are entitled to any kind of reaction and experience in the movies that comes naturally to them. I don't, rationally, begrudge people their right to guffaw even as it annoys me to no end while I experience it. At the same time it just really pains me to see certain classical Hollywood films that I love (as I said, melodramas are the worst; followed by noirs) just laughed through. Maybe I over-value the sustained intensity of only certain scenes in an overall work; but generally in films that really deeply move me in some kind of "serious" way, I can't bring myself to just laugh very much. (Understand that this is a matter of temperament and disposition--my own personal psychology--only; I am quite happy with the inverse: outright comedies that slip in moments or through-lines of pathos, gravity, sorrow, etc. I have fewer personal problems crying at a "dumb" comedy than heartily laughing at parts of a film that's captivated me on a serious "dramatic" level. Which is no doubt why I like the Farrelly Brothers.) So when I watch Daisy Kenyon I usually tear up at parts; I'm moved deeply and my body may constrict into a tightly-wrung ball because of the intensity of the experience; and I don't let out belly laughs when Peter (Henry Fonda) complains about how they changed Sixth Avenue to Avenue of the Americas (a sad and suggestive line, to me, that the MoMA audience found just hilarious for some reason).

When I saw Sirk's Shockproof a few months back, I had the misfortune of sitting in front of a trio of people who, from their conversation before the movie even, were clearly there to laugh, to enjoy some kitschy and fabulous "old movie." (I can't identify with the impulse of people who say they like "old movies" and act as though they've told you something substantive, just as I don't understand when people say they do or do not like "foreign films." Which ones!?) To me there's the distanciation of 'camp,' and then there's something else: the consumption of the cinema of the past for the more-or-less condescending enjoyment of its various inadequacies to the contemporary viewer. And I just can't, can't, can't bring myself to feel aligned with this viewer.

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There are certain types of masterpieces in classical Hollywood--Ford's great films, McCarey's, some of Hawks', The Strawberry Blonde, I Walked with a Zombie--that are almost too delicate for me to see them outside of a totally sympathetic audience. (Ford and Hawks are a little different because of the bawdy humor and machismo that permeates them, too: but the tenderest and most lyrical moments in either are so overwhelming to me that I have to group them here.) Atmosphere has something to do with it, but it's not fundamentally a matter of atmosphere. It's about my personal relationship to, or categorization of, these works. See, the "other" kind of Hollywood masterpiece, one that's a little further from my heart if not my head (on average) is something that I think could sustain a lot of camp-laughter and crowd distractions: most Hitchcock, a lot of Preminger (just not Daisy Kenyon), Billy Wilder, a lot of Westerns (since a lot are meant to elicit knowing laughter in parts), a lot of musicals (ditto)--and with these I can deal with audiences sniggering their way through the running times. But with something like Daisy Kenyon, I confess ... I want almost total silence, I want everybody to share the exact same overwhelming experience I'm sharing. (An authoritarian fantasy, I'm aware, but it's just a fantasy--I've no intention to try to construct a rational argument supporting my internal wish.) Reverence: because I'm an atheist, a materialist (but with a religious and arts-loving upbringing) I think this should be reserved for art and for the dead. Not in all instances; but all instances of it should be for these things, since "we" (I) no longer use them at Mass.

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Anyone interested should read the 24fps Daisy Chain -- me with Damien Bona and Dan Sallitt, a series of brief letters the three of us exchanged regarding Preminger's film.

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Obviously, I haven't actually been talking about Daisy Kenyon yet, but rather about myself, and about my feelings for other people's reactions. The solipsism is hard to shake. But this film really is something to see. It's amazing that Preminger (so he said) couldn't recall even making the film, late in life; that it's widley regarded as "just another" Crawford vehicle. For classical Hollywood it's not matched by very much at all, if you ask me--Only Angels Have Wings, Notorious, Make Way for Tomorrow, a handful of Fords, and a few others maybe. One of the interesting things about it is how well it translates the idea of the literary character on film (for the film comes from a literary, or at least fictional, source) ... usually this is a pipe dream, an unfair expectation that the middlebrow mainstream keeps for the commercial cinema. But in Daisy Kenyon the dream comes alive, and we have that elusive thing, the Three Dimensional Character--actually, we have half a dozen of them. Evaluating this film in terms of character dynamics and psychology (usually such a fruitless, dead-end activity in standard commercial film products) is like watching a big machine, a bunch of pulleys and gears, with no beginning and no end, where every part changes from its original function or expression from the first time you laid eyes on it.

And Preminger--he wasn't so much as the great objective/neutral auteur of classical Hollywood as much as he was the era's greatest whitewater rapids-kayaker of myriad tumultuous perspectives: not coldly objective or ambiguous, but rather full of balanced and lively antagonisms. Durgnat once made a stinging and partly accurate observation that Preminger's cinema offends 'everyone a little and nobody much.' But Daisy Kenyon, which comes from the earlier years, before Preminger got very ambitious, doesn't suffer from the sensationalism of mandatory Issue-mongering, even though it deals tangentially with such ripe issues as modern womanhood, governmental anti-Japanese discrimination, divorce, the moneyed classes, and the experience of war veterans.

Plus, Daisy Kenyon has maybe the most unassumingly impressive last line in cinema--it doesn't sound at all impressive out of context (because it isn't) , so I won't spoil it, but it does crystalize a certain through-line of the dramatic content that maybe doesn't make sense to a first-time viewer until that very end moment.

Such a strange film--after several viewings I still can't quite get at why it looks, sounds, and feels (on a moment-to-moment basis) so perfect, so arresting ...