The 'Kenyon' Review

(You didn't think I was gonna pass up the opportunity to use that headline, did you?)

"Daisy...have...did you ever get into a mood you couldn't find your way out of?"

So asks Henry Fonda's Peter Lapham, a WWII hero and widower, of title character Daisy Kenyon, one of Joan Crawford's most intelligent and moving performances, at a turning point in the picture's incredibly tense love triangle. It is perhaps no accident that Otto Preminger's 1947 film came out around the same time that W.H. Auden published his long poem "The Age of Anxiety." Both are, of course, very different works, but both tap into a very specific post-war mood, a mood we're all still, in a way, trying to find a way out of. They both share the similar milieus; Auden's poem is set in a bohemian New York bar, and features four characters meditating into their drinks, while in Preminger's picture, the ideal place for its ultra-civilized neurotic wrecks to talk out their problems is over martinis at The Stork Club.

Daisy Kenyon is released today on DVD as part of Fox's excellent Film Noir series, and the imprimatur may seem kind of peculiar in this case, as Kenyon is not—I hope this doesn't constitute a spoiler—a crime picture by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it's a melodrama that's directed like a crime picture, the first great film melodrama of the Age of Anxiety, a picture in which each of the love triangle's integers are all up in their own complete messes. Crawford's Kenyon is a commercial illustrator trying to pull out of a dead-end affair with married hot-shot lawyer Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews, pitch-perfect in a difficult role); O'Mara's an overconfident operator who mostly behaves like a heel, but he's got demons of his own, exemplified via his loveless marriage and confused relationship with his two daughters. Fonda's Lapham is a nice, earnest guy who's a bit overeager in his ardent pursuit of Daisy; as the screen capture above suggests, he gets kind of stalkerish on her. Fonda's work has the same kind of troubled depth as Jimmy Stewart's post-war acting.

Screenwriter David Hertz crafted a beautifully multi-layered scenario from Elizabeth Janeway's novel, and Preminger makes a meal of it. My pal Dave Kehr avers that Preminger was "slightly miscast" for this picture and deems it "a Preminger film purely by accident." Circumstantially the latter is almost certainly true, but I see the film as entirely and truly a Preminger work, as does Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch, who contributes a terrifically smart and informative commentary to the disc. First off, the modernity/modernism of Preminger's approach. Then, the sophistication of the moral perspective. Also the chiaroscuro, the tension.

That said, the movie is a fantastic example of Preminger adapting his trademark style to better suit the demands of the material. While the picture contains many of the long takes and gliding camera moves that exemplify the Preminger style, they're not quite as bravura as what you get in, say, his 1945 Fallen Angel, also out in Fox's Noir series. As Hirsch notes in the commentary, there are a lot more over-the-shoulder close-ups—mostly of the film's conflicted lovers in their clinches—than in any other Preminger picture. A lot more cutting too—there are fifteen shots in the first ten minutes of Fallen Angel, while Daisy's first ten serves up thirty-five (minus opening credits in both cases). Preminger and cinematographer Leon Shamroy also adjust Preminger's usual staging strategy, often shooting characters in isolation from each other rather than sharing a common space, as they do more often than not in Preminger work up to that time. (Adding to Daisy's isolation is the fact that, aside from a pal played by Martha Stewart [no, not that one-Ed.] seen in the screen cap above, we never observe her life outside her relations to O'Mara and Lapham; this busy freelancer is never shown collecting assignments, brainstorming with art directors, or any such thing.)

It's true that the image quality on the disc isn't entirely as sharp as one might have wished, but what softness there is—and some of it is part of the film's intended visual scheme—is hardly a distraction. Daisy Kenyon is a spectacularly compelling picture and a jewel in Preminger's crown.

Comments

[Dave]

Amen. A spectacular film that I'm happy to have on dvd. It's probably my favorite Preminger, or at least tied with Bunny Lake Is Missing. But what do do with my vhs dub bootleg?

I love that still, btw.

[bill]

Why doesn't Netflix have this? I was all set to add it to my queue, and it wasn't there. Quite the pisser.

[oakling]

Netflix is full of gaps. They're big enough - they need to start filling in all those forgotten classics and weird one-offs!

[bill]

Well, they just added it. All is well.

[denys theriault]

Let's hope Fox release The 13th Letter soon. Preminger's remake of Clouzot's Le Corbeau.