← Back to Reviews
in
Me, Natalie
Seven years after winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, Patty Duke took on an equally challenging role in a 1959 character study called Me, Natalie, a hopelessly dated look at a young woman's journey into adult and self-esteem that is now almost laughable in its datedness, but Duke still makes it worth a look.
Duke plays Natalie Miller, a young woman who suffers from self-esteem issues ever since she was a small child because she believes that she is ugly. She makes her self a social pariah because she refuses to believe that she is pretty and, after years of alienating everyone in her life, including her favorite Uncle Harold, she finally branches out on her own and moves to Greenwich Village, where she bullies her way into the life of a sensitive young artist.
Stanley Shapiro, who won an Oscar a decade earlier for writing Pillow Talk co-wrote this talky and unfocused drama with A. Martin Zweiback, centered around a character who clearly has a lot of issues going on other than the desire to be pretty. There are mental health issues going on with this character, but they are never addressed as such, making it difficult for us or the other characters onscreen to deal with her. In her narration, Natalie informs us how much she loves her Uncle Harold, but when he passes away, she won't even attend his funeral. When she first meets David, her artist/neighbor, she appears repulsed and shocked that he paints nudes, but when he asks her to pose for him fully clothed, she is mortally offended.
There are dated elements to the story that would just not fly in 2024. When she first arrives in New York, Natalie gets a job waiting tables at a restaurant where she wears fake boobs, a fake butt, and glow in the dark paint on her face. It reminded me of the restaurant in The April Fools where the waitresses were dressed as cavewomen and the male patrons were given clubs to get their attention. Natalie also spends a healthy chunk of screentime in the dumbwaiter of her apartment, which is, by the way, she first meets David the artist while painting one of his also somehow ends up in the same dumbwaiter during a hallucination she has after drinking a party punch spiked with acid. The movie works too hard at trying to be hip and cool and shocking the audience than it does evoking sympathy for the central character.
Patty Duke works very hard in the title role, though according to the IMDB, there was a lot of tension on the set between her and director Fred Coe, which many attributed to a very manic period in Duke's life before she was officially diagnosed with OCD. She also wears false teeth in the movie that are extremely distracting and seriously affect her speech. James Farentino is smooth and sexy as David, Martin Balsam is lovely as Uncle Harold, and so is Nancy Marchand as Nat's mother. Other familiar faces pop up including Elsa Lanchester, Salome Jens, Deborah Winters, and if you don't blink, you might catch the three minute film debut of future Oscar winner Al Pacino as pig who tries to pick up Natalie at a dance. It's not a great movie, but Duke fans should check it out.
Seven years after winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, Patty Duke took on an equally challenging role in a 1959 character study called Me, Natalie, a hopelessly dated look at a young woman's journey into adult and self-esteem that is now almost laughable in its datedness, but Duke still makes it worth a look.
Duke plays Natalie Miller, a young woman who suffers from self-esteem issues ever since she was a small child because she believes that she is ugly. She makes her self a social pariah because she refuses to believe that she is pretty and, after years of alienating everyone in her life, including her favorite Uncle Harold, she finally branches out on her own and moves to Greenwich Village, where she bullies her way into the life of a sensitive young artist.
Stanley Shapiro, who won an Oscar a decade earlier for writing Pillow Talk co-wrote this talky and unfocused drama with A. Martin Zweiback, centered around a character who clearly has a lot of issues going on other than the desire to be pretty. There are mental health issues going on with this character, but they are never addressed as such, making it difficult for us or the other characters onscreen to deal with her. In her narration, Natalie informs us how much she loves her Uncle Harold, but when he passes away, she won't even attend his funeral. When she first meets David, her artist/neighbor, she appears repulsed and shocked that he paints nudes, but when he asks her to pose for him fully clothed, she is mortally offended.
There are dated elements to the story that would just not fly in 2024. When she first arrives in New York, Natalie gets a job waiting tables at a restaurant where she wears fake boobs, a fake butt, and glow in the dark paint on her face. It reminded me of the restaurant in The April Fools where the waitresses were dressed as cavewomen and the male patrons were given clubs to get their attention. Natalie also spends a healthy chunk of screentime in the dumbwaiter of her apartment, which is, by the way, she first meets David the artist while painting one of his also somehow ends up in the same dumbwaiter during a hallucination she has after drinking a party punch spiked with acid. The movie works too hard at trying to be hip and cool and shocking the audience than it does evoking sympathy for the central character.
Patty Duke works very hard in the title role, though according to the IMDB, there was a lot of tension on the set between her and director Fred Coe, which many attributed to a very manic period in Duke's life before she was officially diagnosed with OCD. She also wears false teeth in the movie that are extremely distracting and seriously affect her speech. James Farentino is smooth and sexy as David, Martin Balsam is lovely as Uncle Harold, and so is Nancy Marchand as Nat's mother. Other familiar faces pop up including Elsa Lanchester, Salome Jens, Deborah Winters, and if you don't blink, you might catch the three minute film debut of future Oscar winner Al Pacino as pig who tries to pick up Natalie at a dance. It's not a great movie, but Duke fans should check it out.