With his 1974 film “Daisy Miller” (which I discuss in this clip), the director Peter Bogdanovich accomplished something difficult and rare: he made a great film on the basis of a great work of literature. Many directors yield to the temptation to film a literary classic; few manage anything but a petrified reduction of it, whether owing to a lack of imagination or to an excess of respect. In such cases, these directors would do better to spend some chunk of the budget giving away copies of the beloved book, and then make a movie on a more ordinary subject that they can sink their teeth into uninhibitedly—or, for that matter, make a movie about people like themselves, whose love for a masterful book plays a big role in their lives. Directors need inspiration and an audacity comparable to those of the authors whose work they’re adapting. Bogdanovich took enormous risks in imbuing “Daisy Miller” with elements of comedy that range from the raucous to the subtly off-kilter. The results make for astonishing insights into the world of Henry James. A great movie about a great book is also, by definition, a great work of criticism—and Bogdanovich, of course, started his career in the sixties as one of the crucial movie critics.
P.S. The twenty-three-year-old actor Barry Brown gives a complex, thoughtful, exquisitely calibrated performance that should have launched a big career. But his personal troubles got in the way; he committed suicide in 1978, at the age of twenty-seven. Here’s a brief, very sad biographical outline by Scott Rollins.
