Daisy Miller (film)

Plot synopsis

The title character is a beautiful, flirtatious, nouveau riche young American visiting a Swiss spa with her nervously timid, talkative mother and spoiled, xenophobic younger brother Randolph. There she meets upper class expatriate American Frederick Winterbourne, who is warned about her reckless ways with men by his dowager aunt Mrs. Costello.

When the two are reunited in Rome, Winterbourne tries to convince Daisy her keeping company with suave Italian Mr. Giovanelli, who has no status among the locals, will destroy her reputation with the expatriates, including socialite Mrs. Walker, who is offended by her behavior and vocal about her disapproval. Daisy is too carelessly naive to take either of them seriously.

Winterbourne is torn between his feelings for Daisy and his respect for social customs, and he is unable to tell how she really feels about him beneath her facade of willful abandon. When he meets her and Giovanelli in the Colosseum one night, he decides such behavior makes him unable to love her and lets her know it. Winterbourne warns her against the malaria,against which she has failed to take precautions. She becomes ill, and dies a few days later. At her funeral,Giovanelli tells Winterbourne that she was the most "innocent". Winterbourne wonders whether his ignorance of American customs may have contributed to her fate.

Principal cast

Critical reception

Variety described the film as "a dud" and added, "Cybill Shepherd is miscast in the title role. Frederic Raphaels adaptation of the Henry James story doesnt play. The period production by Peter Bogdanovich is handsome. But his direction and concept seem uncertain and fumbled. Supporting performances by Mildred Natwick, Eileen Brennan and Cloris Leachman are, respectively, excellent, outstanding, and good."

The New York Times said the movie "works amazingly well." It congratulated Shepherd for [catching] "the gaiety and the directness of Daisy, the spontaneity of a spoiled but very likable person. She also manages to be thoughtless without playing dumb or dizzy, and to convey that mixture of recklessness and innocence that bewildered the other Jamesian characters." Bogdanovich was praised for providing "a sensitive glimpse of the hypocrisies and contradictions of the past—without one whiff of nostalgia." (Vincent Canby later named it one of the eleven best films of the year.)

TV Guide rates it one out of a possible four stars and calls it "truly a dud in spite of handsome sets and an intelligent writing job. James is, to say the least, hard to adapt for the screen, but this job becomes hopeless because of Shepherds shallow performance."

Time Out London says, "Bogdanovichs nervous essay in the troubled waters of Henry James, where American innocence and naivete are in perpetual conflict with European decadence and charm, reveals him to be less an interpreter of James than a translator of him into the brusquer world of Howard Hawks. The violence done James in this is forgivable—indeed, Cybill Shepherds transformation of Daisy into a Hawks heroine is strangely successful—but as a result there is no real social conflict in the film, and it becomes just a period variant on The Last Picture Show, without the vigour of that film or the irony of the original James novel."

The original edition of The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, published in 1999, included the film, but the second edition published in 2004 deleted it from its list.

Awards and nominations

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design but lost to The Great Gatsby.