ME, NATALIE

US, 1969, 111 minutes, Colour.
Patty Duke, James Farentino, Nancy Marchand, Martin Balsam Salome Jens, Elsa Lanchester.
Directed by Fred Coe.

Me, Natalie takes a difficult theme. The ugly teenage girl, Natalie, is shown as having a sense of her ugliness (a 'hang-up') from her babyhood and as never having come to terms with it and so she has never found herself. The pictures of the Miller's family life in Brooklyn is not too different from family life anywhere else in the U.S. or Canada or England or Australia. Conventional mother and father try to make plain daughter make good. Plain daughter leaves home to discover the world. Plain daughter is pleased with her liberty but wants to be free. Plain daughter is also hurt. Finding oneself is a mixture of pain and happiness. One hopes that the individual who discovers herself will be able to be happy.

This is what Me, Natalie is about and it tackles its subject quite well - a bit overcrowded with Greenwich Village sensation at times, slightly predictable too, but good nonetheless. Patty Duke is not as plain as she might be and capitalises on her height and slightly protruding teeth to convince us she is plain. But she is good enough as an actress to get us involved in her worries and girls in the audience would probably have a lot to say about her and what happens to her. Nancy Marchand is excellent as her mother and there are two fine vignettes by Martin Balsam as Uncle Harry and Salome Jens as a go-go dancer called Shirley.

1. Were you interested in Natalie as a person? Was she typical of plain girls in ordinary suburbs? Were her problems theirs?

2. What was the point of showing how Natalie remembered her mother's words about plain little girls growing up to be pretty and pretty girls growing plain? Was she disappointed in her parents for their kindliness in deceiving her?

3. Why did she value her mirror and look in the mirror so often?

4. Was Patty Duke plain enough to make Natalie convincing?

5. How did you feel for Natalie being pushed by her mother into dates, her being left as a wall-flower, sitting in the car with Betty and Stanley? Why was Natalie rude to the fat boy?

6. Why did Natalie dress up for the graduation dance and wait at the ferry wharf?

7. What were Natalie's feelings for her parents? How did they change during the film?

8. What were Natalie's feelings towards her Uncle Harold? Why did she idealise him?

9. Did she believe her uncle 's parable of the red bottle and the green bottle? Why was she so disappointed in him when he brought Shirley home? (Were you surprised? Why?)

10. Why did Natalie hate Shirley? Did she judge her harshly? Did you understand Shirley better after the sequence in her dressing-room?

11. Why did Natalie leave home? Did her parents try to run her life too much? Was she doing the right thing?

12. Did Natalie make a success of her life in Greenwich Village? her decoration of her room (to make it her), her job as a waitress, her antagonism towards David and his painting?

13. Why did she and David become friends? Did they really communicate?

14. How did he make her see that she had so many chips on her shoulder, that she hadn't found herself because she had not left the Village?

15. How did she reveal David to himself - that he had come to the Village to find out that he was not a painter?

16. How did the sequence of Natalie's visit home show how she had changed and how her mother had not? Was her mother right in worrying about her?

17. Betty's wedding - what impact did it make on Natalie, especially Stanley's bitterness?

18. Why did Natalie not stay for David and marry him after his divorce?

19. Had she found and accepted herself as a person by the end of the film? What future did Natalie have?