Movie Review: Penelope, Starring Natalie Wood, Ian Bannen, Dick Shawn, and Peter Falk (1966)

Natalie Wood, in a lobby card from Penelope, 1966. Unfortunately, this scene was cut from the movie.

Dick Shawn and Natalie Wood in Penelope, 1966.

Peter Falk and Natalie Wood in Penelope, 1966. Her scenes with Falk are the best thing in the movie, and his role as a detective feels like a dry-run for Columbo.

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 34^th 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.