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The opening shot (shoes waiting to be shined in the cavernous halls of a Swiss resort) establishes the Henry James texture, Peter Bogdanovich purposefully proceeds to rattle it with American screwball tempo. Touring Yanks on the Old Europe veranda, young Randolph Miller (James McMurtry) is an owlish brat searching for sweets, Miss Daisy from Schenectady (Cybill Shepherd) strolls in with parasol and Katharine Hepburn's Bringing Up Baby prattle. Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is beguiled, as a dandy who's "lived too long in foreign parts" would be, on the other hand his aunt (Mildred Natwick) is well-versed in the rules of the game and warns against mingling with a lass "of the last crudity." A garrulous force storming through a set of ornate tableaux, the heroine is indifferent to Byron and delighted by society parties. Her pensive suitor can't decide if she's naïve or a tease, the camera dollies in for an evanescent exchange of looks at the Pincio park, where Renoir's puppet theater makes a telling cameo. "Wouldn't it be funny if they were perfectly innocent and sincere and had no idea the impression they're creating?" "No, it wouldn't be funny." No less than The Last Picture Show, a lament for an epoch couched in heartfelt cinephiliac memory. (Not for nothing does Brown resemble both Bogdanovich and Proust.) Visconti and Wyler are the main models of composition, deep-focus and mirrors for Daisy's entrance into the drawing-room of the iron-jawed doyenne (Eileen Brennan), a ground-level wide-angle for the Colosseum at night. Cloris Leachman's fluttery hypochondria, Duilio Del Prete warbling "Pop Goes the Weasel," deathly news glimpsed through a gauzy curtain—period-movie luxury shaken comically and tragically, a castle with a hole in it. "Let us sing of the days that are gone..." (cf. The Magnificent Ambersons). With Nicholas Jones and George Morfogen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |