Daisy Kenyon

 I think that most of us are a mystery to ourselves.  Other people seem to pose problems more soluble -- but that is because we simplify their motives and don't have access to their depths.  Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon (1947) dramatizes these propositions.  Although made according to prevailing Hollywood paradigms (the movie was produced by 20th Century Fox), the film is as opaque and inexplicable as a European art film.  I'm uncertain as to whether this is due to incoherent and inattentive screenwriting, an attempt to adapt a novel that is too intricate and interior to be rendered in film, or some species of rebarbative brilliance unanticipated in film noir of the era.  The movie poses a curious riddle -- I don't know that it's particularly good, but it is certainly baffling. 

At a basic level, Daisy Kenyon explores a love-triangle in which, it seems, none of the participants is particularly satisfactory.  (The choice for Daisy is between bad and worse, perhaps, a realistic dilemma.) Daisy is a forty-something woman who works as a graphic designer from her Greenwich Village apartment.  The apartment is her privileged space and she feels free and safe in that place -- she has apparently lived there for seven years when the action of the movie commences.  The film has a curiously contemporary feeling:  Daisy, like many "creatives" in the post-Covid era, works from home; she has a reasonably satisfactory relationship with a man that we would today call her "fuck-buddy".  This man is a prominent corporate litigator named O'Mara.  He's married to his wife, Lucille, and has two teenage daughters with her; both girls revere their father and distrust their mother -- Lucille takes out her frustrations on one of the girls and has, apparently, hit the child so hard on the ear as to draw blood.  The girls call their father by his first-name "Dan".  O'Mara's wife is the daughter of the lawyer's senior partner, a factor that would complicate the situation except that the older lawyer is completely detached and indifferent to the situation.  Seemingly, the relationship with Daisy is well-known to everyone -- for instance, O'Mara's secretaries know all about the affair and comment cynically on it.  Daisy thinks she's satisfied with the liaison with O'Mara and, sometimes, they talk about the lawyer leaving his wife to marry his mistress -- but it's apparent that this will never happen.  

Pete Lapham, a combat veteran from the recent war, enters the scene.  Neither O'Mara nor Daisy are jealous of one another (at least ostensible) and their relationship is what we would call "open" today.  Daisy's friend, Miss Angelus, has set up the date.  Lapham and Daisy go out on the town and encounter O'Mara, Lucille, and his oldest daughter at the Stork Club -- they are entertaining a visiting novelist.  Daisy feels humiliated and she leaves the nightclub with her date.  They spend the night talking and walking in Greenwich Village and, at 3 am, Lapham says he will call Daisy in a couple days so that they can go to a ballgame.  Inexplicably, Lapham says that he "loves" Daisy, shocking her.  Equally inexplicably, Lapham doesn't make the call and Daisy is indignant about being "stood up" by the war-vet (a yacht designer before the conflict).  Pete Lapham seems damaged somehow -- he was twice wounded in the War, returned from service only to have his wife die; he's a widower when the movie introduces him.  Lapham was a tank commander in World War II and obsessively relives the liberation of a French town called Rennes. He remembers that the citizens of Rennes greeted the GIs with open arms and rang the bells incessantly.

O'Mara, who is cynical and selfish, is persuaded by a Washington civil rights lawyer to take up the case of a Nisei Japanese veteran whose property was wrongfully appropriated from him during the War.  He travels to California to litigate the case and is gone for 18 days.  Lapham re-establishes his relationship with Daisy during that time and the two get married -- this all happens while O'Mara is on the west coast.  (O'Mara loses the case and is embittered at his defeat -- he's also been assaulted and physically beaten for his audacity in representing a Japanese-American; these events seem to trigger a mid-life crisis in him.).  Daisy departs from New York and lives in a cottage with Lapham on Cape Cod.  Lapham is having problems with post-traumatic stress disorder and has nightmares in which he hears the ringing of bells at Rennes together with the sound of gunfire and shells bursting.  He seems very high-strung and on the verge of a crack-up.  Daisy has business in the City and returns to her apartment (now sub-let to Miss Angelus).  O'Mara happens to be in town and goes to her place where he tries to have sex with her.  She repels him, but O'Mara proclaims that he intends to win her back and will divorce his wife to marry him.  This comprises the first three-acts of a movie built as five-act structure.  Up to this point, the film has been refreshingly adult, cynical, cleverly written, and very interesting -- the movie is surprisingly nonchalant about the unconventional sexual and romantic relationships of its principals.  But the fourth and fifth act are largely inexplicable to me.  Lucille commences a highly publicized divorce proceeding against O'Mara.  She demands sole custody without visitation of the couple's children -- a demand that the daughters themselves reject.  The case involves fault principles -- to get a divorce in that era, the parties had to prove that one of the spouses was at fault for the collapse of the marriage.  (This entire aspect of the movie will be largely incomprehensible to modern audiences who have never known any system but no-fault divorce on demand.)  A big and scandalous trial ensues - the gist of the proceedings is that Lucille must publicly prove adultery between O'Mara and Daisy.  This makes no sense in that everyone knows of the adulterous relationship and concedes it to have existed.  (The plot would make more sense if O'Mara tried to prove that Lucille condoned the adultery, a defense in the bad old days -- but O'Mara seems too noble to engage in mud-throwing of that sort.)  There's a courtroom confrontation in which Daisy is cross-examined as the correspondent in the divorce.  O'Mara who thinks he loves Daisy can't bear to see her mistreated in this way, withdraws his defenses and agrees to a quickie Vegas divorce, conceding custody of his daughters to their mother.  In the fifth act, Lapham and O'Mara meet with Daisy to decide her fate -- will she remain married to Lapham or will she divorce him and marry O'Mara, who is now free to re-wed?  The men discuss this problem in a civilized way, more or less, treating Daisy as an accessory to the conversation.  The debate moves to Cape Cod where O'Mara presents divorce papers, apparently accepted by Lapham, to Daisy.  She throws the lawyer out and drives away from the cottage in a rage, crashing her car and nearly freezing in a snowstorm.  Daisy makes her way to a place where Lapham and O'Mara are playing cards and casually discussing the situation.  Daisy picks Lapham as the lesser of the two evils and film ends on that unpromising note.  The viewer has the sense that Lapham is half deranged, high-strung and unstable, and likely to murder, or, at least, seriously harm Daisy in the future. 

Daisy is played by the peri-menopausal Joan Crawford who seems to be acting with every fiber of her  being.  She's compulsively watchable.  The emotionally remote, but explosive, Lapham is played by Henry Fonda in a querulous, strangely detached way.  Dana Andrews plays the part of the emotionally effusive corporate lawyer O'Mara -- he calls everyone "sweetheart" or "buttercup" including Lapham and his senior partner (and father-in-law).  The film is designed to posit Lapham as the polar opposite to O'Mara -- the two men couldn't be more different except that they both have a weirdly dismissive laissez faire attitude to Daisy.  The emotional tone of the movie is icy and it's not clear whether the picture is supposed to be bracingly cynical and funny or melodramatic -- in fact, it oscillates between the two moods.  The pictures seems very sophisticated, an adult entertainment that is sharply and effectively written -- that is, until the fourth courtroom act which just seems silly and overwrought.  The climax is intentionally off-putting -- it's pretty hard to construe Daisy's marriage to Lapham as the solution to anything.  

Daisy Kenyon confused audiences in 1947 and remains baffling.  It's now earned a semi-cult status.  I can't tell if it's a bold and brilliant proto-feminist work or just a confusing mess.  Most likely, to some extent, the picture is both.