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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (11) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (7)
Hollywood self-satire is also a corridor of mirrors where movie makers are apt to start cringing.
Wood's movements are spasmodic and graceless. The director Robert Mulligan can't quite find the rhythm, either. Some of the picture is whimsical, some of it as lugubrious as a horror movie.
Covering a two-year period, the outcome is at times disjointed and episodic as the title character played by Natalie Wood emerges more nebulous than definitive.
Gavin Lambert's screenplay (from his own novel) lives in the land of the ambiguous and fey, which is probably why the film now seems subtle and attractive.
The talented director Robert Mulligan, apparently engulfed by studio overproduction, falters at times, not always knowing whether to play things straight or for laughs.
Too much, too soon, for Daisy and for us.
Entertaining showbiz tale despite being short on execution.
Grim but sometimes well-directed tale of insidious studio types in Old Hollywood.
Director Mulligan can't find the right tone for Gavin Lambert's inside Hollywood tale about a girl rise to stardom before collapsing and so the story veers from a cautionary fable to Gothic melodrama to farce, but some of the acting is good.
Wood has one great breakdown scene, reminiscent of Judy Garland (an inspiration for the character) but she lacks the star's range and depth of emotion, and the songs don't hold a candle to Arlen and Co.
This is such a disappointing movie! It's got a fantastic cast, but it wastes them on a cliched, predictable, old story with nothing new to offer. I will say that it has some good moments, but overall it's a let down, especially the end.
Super Reviewer
"Inside Daisy Clover" is the earliest movie I've seen that features an actress play on the same field as any of the top actors of the time. Natalie Wood never really got the credit she deserved as an actress, and this was the reason she became the legend she's remembered as. The supporting cast is amazing with Christopher Plummer as the very creepy studio executive and Robert Redford as a closeted Bi-Sexual actor, which seemed incredibly revolutionary for the time it was made. It's kind of the female version "Rebel without a Cause" mixed in with a demented Sherry Temple story.
"Inside Daisy Clover" starts with Mrs. Clover(Ruth Gordon) reporting her husband missing. So, what if it took her seven years to do so? Who's counting, anyway? Her 15-year old daughter Daisy(Natalie Wood) does, just after her birthday present arrives in the person of Raymond Swan(Christopher Plummer) who auditions her for a role in his film studio. She gets the part and goes far in mind from Angel Beach, California to Hollywood but loses her mother to an institution, and in the process is given over to the guardianship of her older sister Gloria(Betty Harford). The darkly entertaining "Inside Daisy Clover" is a critical deconstruction of Hollywood that sits on the edge between old and new and made at a time when the studio system was crumbling once and for all. The technicolor musical numbers are resplendent, just as the movie dwells on the human cost of becoming a star where Daisy must perform not only on the screen but off too. At the heart of it all is a massive public relations campaign to soften the edges of Daisy into a desexualized gamine ripe for public consumption in movies to distract the public from the Great Depression, at the same time she has a sexual affair with an older man that is statutory rape.(I actually prefer the old system in the way information was controlled. Right now, I know too many personal details of people I could care less about in movies I will never see.) What Daisy loses in the bargain is her freedom and it is telling that she is happy only when barefoot, in a sort of reverse Cinderella fable. The main problem is that Natalie Wood is unconvincing playing a teenager which is ironic since she was a child star at one time, as was Roddy McDowall. Her co-star, Robert Redford, on the edge of his own personal stardom, gives a very loose performance and the next time viewers would see any gaps in his armor would be in of all movies, "Spy Game."
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