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| Natalie Wood, in a lobby card from Penelope, 1966. Unfortunately, this scene was cut from the movie. |
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| Natalie Wood and Dick Shawn in Penelope, 1966. |
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| Peter Falk and Natalie Wood in Penelope, 1966. Her scenes with Falk are the best thing about the movie, and his role as a detective feels like a dry-run for Columbo. |
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| Natalie Wood shows off one of her terrific Edith Head costumes in Penelope, 1966. Her wardrobe cost $250,000. |
Penelope is a
comedy caper film, starring Natalie Wood as the title character. Penelope is a
bored housewife who robs her own husband’s bank, just to get his attention. She
confesses her secret life of theft to her analyst, played by Dick Shawn.
Lieutenant Bixbee, the detective assigned to the case, expertly played by the
always excellent Peter Falk, is immediately suspicious of Penelope. Will he
figure out who the true thief actually was? Will Penelope end up serving 10-15
years in prison? Will her analyst confess his true feelings of love to her? Will
Penelope end up back with her boring husband at the end of the movie? Yes, no, yes,
and yes.
The problem with Penelope
is that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It satirizes Freudian
analysis and Greenwich Village beatniks, two topics that were already worn out
in 1966. I couldn’t figure out what outcome is the audience supposed to be
rooting for. Are we supposed to want Penelope to remain with her super-boring
husband? Are we supposed to want Penelope to run off with her analyst? I didn’t
really want either of those things to happen. The roles of her husband and her
analyst are thankless, boring supporting roles. Ian Bannen is blandly handsome
and boring as Penelope’s husband, and that’s exactly what the part calls for.
Dick Shawn is fine as her analyst, but Shawn was truly at his best unleashing
his zany comedic energy, as he did when playing Lornezo St. DuBois, (LSD) the
over-the-top actor who plays Adolf Hitler in Springtime for Hitler in The
Producers. The best-written male role in the movie is Lt. Bixbee, and
because of Peter Falk’s excellent performance, the scenes between Wood and Falk
are the best in the movie. Falk is perfecting the shtick he’ll use when playing
Columbo. You can tell that Bixbee is more suspicious of Penelope then she
realizes, and he just lets her keep talking until she makes a mistake. I
half-expected Bixbee to pretend to leave, and then turn around and say “Just
one more thing…”
Bixbee also has the odd habit of carrying packs of baseball
cards in his pockets just to chew the gum that came with them. (Wouldn’t it be
cheaper and easier just to carry packs of gum?) As a baseball card collector, I
wanted to shout at the screen and tell Peter Falk and Natalie Wood to look for
Jim Palmer rookie cards in their packs of 1966 Topps. As Penelope opens her
pack of cards, she says, “Who’s Ron Swoboda?” That’s a very funny joke for Mets
fans, but one that probably went over the heads of most moviegoers, as Swoboda
wasn’t a star player—1966 was only his second year as an outfielder for the
Mets. (Swoboda is most famous for his diving catch in the 1969 World Series.) The
joke would have been funnier if Penelope had mentioned a more famous baseball
player.
Natalie Wood does as good a job as she can playing Penelope.
She gets to do a lot of different things in the movie—disguise herself as an old
woman to rob the bank, disguise herself as a French blonde to dispose of some
of the money to throw off the police, and sing a folky ballad, “The Sun is Grey”
when Penelope was a Greenwich Village beatnik, before she meets square, boring
future husband. Wood also got to wear an Edith Head wardrobe that cost
$250,000, and she looks stunning in everything she wears in the movie. Wood’s
salary for Penelope was a cool $750,000,
a very high amount for an actress at that time, which attests to her star power.
The faults of the movie are not hers, as she does everything she can to elevate
the material.
Had Penelope been
made 10 years later, it might have become a story of feminist empowerment, of
Penelope taking control of her own life by stealing from the husband who
controls her life. As it is, Penelope becomes
a story about robbing banks just to get your husband’s attention, which makes me
think there are other issues in their marriage that need addressing. The mid-1960’s
were also an odd time in Hollywood—in the outside world, things were
changing at lightning speed, but yet Hollywood was still cranking out comedies
like Penelope that bore zero
relevance to the era in which they were made.
Wood wasn’t that thrilled about playing Penelope. Later she
said, "I broke out in hives and suffered anguish that was very real pain
every day we shot. Arthur Hiller, the director, kept saying, 'Natalie, I think
you're resisting this film,' while I rolled around the floor in agony." (Quote
from TCM’s website on Penelope. Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary
Life includes most of this quote, but not the full quote, so I’m not sure
what source the full quote is from.)
Wood’s real passion projects during this period were the
dramas Inside Daisy Clover and This Property is Condemned. However, the
realities of the box-office meant that she was also making big-budget comedies
like Sex and the Single Girl, The Great
Race, and Penelope. Wood didn’t
find these comedies fulfilling as an actress. During this period of her life,
Wood was also going through frequent analysis, so one can only imagine what she
felt about the satire of analysis found in both Sex and the Single Girl and Penelope.
Given better scripts, I think Natalie Wood could have been successful in
comedies, as she brought the same dedication and commitment to comedic roles
that she did to her dramatic parts.
Oddly enough, Penelope
is one of the most difficult Natalie Wood movies to track down. Despite
being produced by a major studio, MGM, it’s never been released on DVD, and doesn’t
seem to have been released on VHS either. It’s not available on Netflix or
iTunes Movies. I was only able to watch it because it shows up on Turner
Classic Movies every so often. It’s a curious fate for a major studio release
of that era starring a well-known movie star whose popularity continues to
endure.
1966 was an interesting year for Natalie Wood, as she was
awarded the “World Film Favorite-Female” Golden Globe in January, and in April was
“honored” by the Harvard Lampoon as
the “Worst Actress of Last Year, This Year, and Next Year.” Much to the
surprise of the Lampoon staff, Wood
came in person to accept the award, the first honoree to do so. Wood said, “I
decided to accept it in person, and delivered an Academy Award acceptance sort
of speech, telling them I was moved to tears.” (Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, p.314)
There’s silent newsreel footage of Wood at Harvard, being a very good sport and
flashing her movie star grin the entire time. The plaque that Wood accepted at
Harvard sold at auction for $1,625 in 2015.
The day after accepting the award at Harvard, Wood went to
New York City and appeared as a guest on the TV show What’s My Line? You can watch Natalie Wood’s appearance on What’s My Line? here. She’s very funny
as she tries to stump the panel by adopting a Russian accent, and completely
throwing panelist Arlene Francis for a loop when Francis asks her, “Are you
something other than American?” Wood replies, “Well, in my mind.” Wood also
visited an art dealer in Manhattan. Journalist Tom Wolfe accompanied her to the
art dealer, and he wrote about his time with Wood in his essay “The Shockkkkkk
of Recognition,” later collected in his 1968 book The Pump House Gang. Had I been in Wolfe’s shoes and been a dashing
young New Journalist working for the New
York World Journal Tribune in 1966, I would have gladly accepted that
assignment. I also would have gladly accepted the assignment, “watch Natalie
Wood watch paint dry.”
Penelope, released
in November of 1966, represents the end of an era in Natalie Wood’s career. Wood
was only 28 years old when Penelope was
released, but she had been working steadily in films and television since the
age of 5. Her career had scaled heights that any other actress would have envied.
Wood was nominated for her third Oscar in 1964 at the age of 25. She had successfully
made the transition from child star to teen star, and then adult star, making
movies at each stage of her life that have become classics. There’s Miracle on 34th Street, the
Christmas perennial, released in 1947 when Natalie was 8 years old, from her
teenage years there’s Rebel Without a
Cause, from 1955, when she was 17, and you can take your pick of several
excellent performances from her early 20’s: Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story, both
from 1961, Gypsy, from 1962, 1963’s Love With the Proper Stranger, and This Property is Condemned from 1966.
After Penelope was
released, to mostly so-so reviews, Natalie Wood bought herself out of her
contract with Warner Brothers for $175,000. Wood also fired her agents,
lawyers, business manager, and other support staff. She took a deliberate break
from filmmaking, and didn’t return to the silver screen until 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. After
Penelope, Wood only made four more
movies during the rest of her life, and was at work on a fifth when she died in
1981. She also made several made-for-TV movies during the 1970’s.
Unfortunately, Wood’s break from filmmaking after Penelope wrapped meant that she lost out
on a great role, as her ex-beau Warren Beatty tried to convince her to accept
the role of Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and
Clyde. It was one of the few times when Beatty was not able to get what he
wanted from a woman, as Wood turned him down. Beatty said, “I guess I wasn’t
too persuasive; at that point I wasn’t getting a lot of offers and Natalie was
riding the crest of her career.” Wood said in a 1969 interview, “I loved the
script and I loved the part, but I had personal reasons. I didn’t want to go to
Texas on location and well, Warren and I are friends, but working with him had
been difficult before.” (Both quotes from Natasha:
The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, p.313) Wood turned it down in part because she didn’t want to be
away from her analyst. Beatty had been turned down by just about every actress
in Hollywood, and eventually settled on the then-unknown Faye Dunaway for the
role of Bonnie. It’s a fascinating what-if to think what Bonnie and Clyde would have been like with Natalie Wood instead of
Faye Dunaway. I have no doubt that Wood could have done an excellent job as
Bonnie.
In her personal life, Wood finally found the stability and
happiness that had eluded her in her 20’s. She married Richard Gregson in 1969,
and gave birth to their daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner the next year. While
Wood and Gregson divorced in 1972, they remained on good terms. Later that
year, she remarried her first husband, Robert Wagner, and in March of 1974 gave
birth to their daughter Courtney. It’s part of the cruel calculus of Hollywood
that women often have to choose between having a family and having a career,
and the career of Natalie Wood makes that clear. Wood pushed herself very hard
to have the successful career she did, and throughout the 1960’s she was
extremely successful professionally, while her personal life was often in
turmoil. After Penelope, she
deliberately stepped back from her career and focused on her personal life, and
by all accounts was a devoted and happy mother. However, her career during the
1970’s was not as successful as it had been in the 1960’s. Wood was still a big
star throughout the 1970’s, but she was now more famous for what she had done
in the past than whatever her current project was. Had Wood lived longer I
think she might have found a happier balance between her family and her career.
If, like me, you’re a fan of Natalie Wood, you should try to
track down Penelope. For all of its
faults, it’s still worth seeing, if only for her scenes with Peter Falk and her
wardrobe.
