Daisy Miller

Bogdanovich's nervous essay in the troubled waters of Henry James, where American innocence and naiveté are in perpetual conflict with European decadence and charm, reveals him to be less an interpreter of James than a translator of him into the brusquer world of Howard Hawks. The violence done James in this is forgiveable - indeed, Cybill Shepherd's transformation of Daisy into a Hawks heroine is strangely successful - but as a result there is no real social conflict in the film, and it becomes just a period variant on The Last Picture Show, without the vigour of that film or the irony of the original James novel.