When You and I Were Young, Maggie

Daisy Miller (1974)
directed by Peter Bogdanovich
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan

The lovely animated credit sequence at the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel includes a special thanks to "our old friends", among them Polly Platt. I assigned Karina Longworth's Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman podcast in my class on New Hollywood, taught during the pandemic a couple of springs ago, but I could tell that my students were unconvinced by my insistence, at the end of the term, that the man who threw Platt over for Cybill Shepherd continued to make great movies without his first wife. 

I mention Platt's acknowledgment in Wes Anderson's 2014 film, released after her death in 2011, because the patron saint of this blog (ill-served as he may be by its slapdash commitment to the pictures) always cared about credit sequences. They are full of gratitude to cast (typically expressed in picture credits), crew, and residents of whichever corner of the earth hosted both for a period of weeks or months: Archer City, or McCracken, or the Plaza Hotel.

In "Daisy Miller", it's a straightforward, gracious 

WE ARE INDEBTED TO THE CITIZENS OF
ROME, ITALY
AND
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND.

In an interview included on the DVD, PB hits the highlights: Orson Welles anecdote, Cary Grant impression, tender recollection of dead pals and lost loves. As he usually does, he struck me as altogether sympathetic and decent in his understanding of life's injustices and disappointments, echoing the timbre of this wonderful film. 

There's no need to return to Wes Anderson, but I liked both "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and The French Dispatch so much for the qualities in each I can only describe as Lubitsch-adjacent, which I think (apropos "our old friends") came to Anderson less through the movies of Lubitsch himself than through Peter's mentorship and career.

The highlights here are Mildred Natwick sipping tea over gossip with Barry Brown in a communal heated pool between a floating sterling tea service, the easy swing of dolly shots Bogdanovich relies on to reframe conversations in the middle of long takes, and the extent to which those long takes serve both to reinforce the strength of Shepherd's bright and lovestruck (with the role, with herself, with Peter) performance and to underscore the artificiality of the entire production, waiting for days for the fog to clear from Lake Geneva in order to shoot a sunset over the promenade.

"It's only a paper moon..."