Peter Viney's Blog

Darling

1965
(UK release September 1965)

 

Directed by John Schlesinger
Produced by Joseph Janni
Screenplay by Frederick Raphael
Music by John Dankworth
Cinematography by Kenneth Higgins

From an idea by Frederick Raphael, John Schlesinger & Joseph Janni

CAST

Julie Christie – Diana Scott
Laurence Harvey – Miles Brand
Dirk Bogarde – Robert Gold
Roland Curram – Malcolm
José Luis de Vilallonga – Prince Cesaredella Romita
Basil Henson – Alec Prosser-Jones
Helen Lindsay – Felicity Prosser-Jones
Peter Bayliss- Lord Grant
Trevor Bowen – Toby Bridges
Pauline Yates – Estelle Gold
Marika Rivera – weird woman at Paris party

The 60s retrospective reviews continue …

The third Julie Christie in a row. Here’s your pub quiz question:

Q: For which of these 60s films did Julie Christie win the “Best Actress” Academy Award?

A  Billy Liar  B  Darling  C  Doctor Zhivago  D  Far From The Madding Crowd  E  Petulia

You can guess the answer. She won the BAFTA for the same film.

Darling also won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay  (Frederick Raphael).

Re-watching it, the thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was Julie Christie (Best Actress of 1965) doing the background linking narration in character. What an awful screenplay, I thought. Her narration is peppered with You see … and You know … and all of them sound forced in and unnatural. Whether that was the Best Actress’s fault in delivery, or the Best Screenwriter’s fault in scripting is hard to judge, though given the rest of the script and Ms Christie’s otherwise powerful screen presence, I tend to blame the screenwriter. However, in his defence, there are many quotes from the movie on IMDB, an unprecedented amount, and there are many lines that stick in the head. I’ll make use of their availability below.

American poster: ADULT was a buzz word

The film foresaw the rise of the Super Model, in Julie Christie’s character, Diana Scott. I might have chosen a more exotic name, but then Jean Shrimpton had an equally mundane name. Karen was surprised that white Courreges boots existed in 1964, but Diana Scott was wearing them.

It was filmed in 1964 in Black and White and released in 1965. The US version was four minutes shorter to remove nudity (but fear not American readers, blu-ray ad DVD are the British cut).

PLOT

The opening sequence … a bill poster is putting up a poster of Diana Scott

Diana Scott (Julie Christie) is a model, married to Tony. She’s bored … her boredom is a running character trait. She meets TV Arts Presenter Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). They start an affair, leave their spouses and set up in unmarried bliss in a flat. Robert brings in lots of books, she brings in LPs. Soon the flat is bookshelf lined.

Diana (Julie Christie) and Robert (Dirk Bogarde) may be incompatible. Hint to Robert: it might be the cardigan

Books are a running symbol. once Diana starts mixing in fashionable society, we see displays of books concealing a cocktail cabinet, and a box of cigars. Later when inevitably things go wrong, Diana attacks Robert’s books.

Diana Scott (Julie Christie)

Diana throws a jealous wobbly when Robert visits his wife and kids, but forgets it as she begins to mix with the rich and famous in media-land. She meets Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey) an advertising executive at the Glass Corporation. He gets her a part as Jacqueline in a trashy film, Jacqueline.

Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey)

There are some astonishing and effective asides here on racism and sexism. There is a strong image of Diana as “the face” in an advertising campaign on posters with starving Biafran children. The art work is amazingly similar to Banksy, 30 to 40 years on. She attends a charity event for world hunger, and they juxtapose the Biafra images on the walls, with the black kids dressed up as 18th century footmen serving at the event. There are black guests present:

Diana Scott: Darling, two of the most gorgeous negroes you’ve ever seen have just gone up the stairs. What on earth is going on up there?

then:

Lord Grant: I like your black boys, John. I suppose I can’t wrap one up and take him home?
John: I wouldn’t advise you to try.
Miles: They’re all numbered, Alex.

Robert is not part of this decadent world. Diana is pregnant and has according to synopses, an abortion, which would have been illegal then. As it’s in a smart private hospital, I had assumed it was a miscarriage.

Swinging Paris … somewhat sleazier than Swinging London

Diana flies off to Paris with Miles.  Miles turns out to be a total sleaze. He takes her to a “swingers party.” When I talk about the Swinging Sixties, I’m thinking Carnaby Street and Kings Road and young people, but for this writer and director, the swinging sixties was 30 plus year olds in a sleazy Rat Pack / Playboy Mansion world, which was a half-generation older. Porn films, party games with stripping and truth games ensue. Though Diana is repelled, she holds her own in the truth game acting in the role of Miles.

Transvestite: Olé! Tell me, Miles, if you could be anything in the world, what would you most want to be?
Diana (as Miles): A pimp in a royal whorehouse.

The sex theme continues. A conversation with Miles:

Diana: Imagine if …
Miles:  What?
Diana: It took three.
Miles: Three?
Diana: Sexes. To make a child.
Miles: Very entertaining?
Diana:  Everything would be different, wouldn’t it? Quite different. With three sexes.

At another point as they pass a statue outside the Glass Corporation offices:

Diana: What’s this supposed to be?
Miles: Oh, it’s known for many in the group as three couples taking their pleasures with a fourth looking on.

She lies to Robert, who sees her plane tickets and realizes she came back to London two days earlier than she had told him. She’s back in the media scene with Robert at an art exhibition hearing lines like this:

Critic: A sort of furious lyricism one seldom finds in Whitechapel these days.

Robert reveals he knows. He calls her a bitch and a whore. She calls him a bastard. Strong stuff in 1965. They break up. He finishes:

Robert: I’d never have believed that someone so trivial and so shallow could cause so much pain.

And she throws his books around!

Diana is on a photo shoot with Mal. Mal created the Diana Scott look. There’s a scene you couldn’t do nowadays where first she tries to spike her goldfish in their bowl, then adds gin and bits of food. We see the goldfish floating dead … she buries them in a Swan Vestas box in the Thames.

(I would say that given the size of his role Roland Curram deserved equal billing with Messrs Bogarde and Harvey).

I think we have to assume that goldfish WERE harmed in the making of this picture

Miles secures her a role as The Happiness Girl in an advert for Italian chocolate, which is being filmed in a palazzo (actually a Medici palazzo). The prince, Cesare, is an older widower with children, and takes a liking to her … probably because she’s in medieval floor sweeping dresses which make her look anything but a swinging sixties chick. She thinks he’s speaking for his son when he tells her.

Happy holidays: Diana (Julie Christie) and Mal (Roland Curram)

Diana decides to take a holiday in Italy with her gay photographer friend, Mal or Malcolm (Roland Curram). She tells him:

Diana: I was just thinking how nice it would be if we could live here. I could do without sex. I don’t really like it that much. If I could just feel – complete.

That’s a very telling line. If she had enjoyed sex perhaps, she would not have used it as a tool of her trade as a model, using Robert and Miles as it suited.

Someday my prince will come … José Luis de Vilallonga  as Prince Cesare della Romita

The Prince visits in a motor launch and proposes marriage but she declines. She’s soon bored (especially as Mal isn’t showing her sufficient attention, but nipping off with lithe handsome waiters).

Diana, Mal & an attractive waiter

She goes back to London, gets bored again. Just to keep up with sexism, she beats a car to a space on a meter:

Male driver: Go on, get out of it. Women drivers!

So she returns to Italy, marries the prince and is soon in a fairy tale palazzo, waited on hand and foot. There’s even a footman to open and close doors for her. The prince nips off to Rome (probably to visit a mistress) and she dines alone in the huge dining room, waited on by a staff of three or four. She gets bored, of course. She walks off and starts smashing stuff.

She flies back to London, where she has persuaded Robert to meet her. They go to bed, and she thinks they’re back together, but he insists they’re not … it was just for old time’s sake. He drives her to Heathrow and packs her back off to the prince.

Robert (Dirk Bogarde) drives Diana back to the airport

As she boards the plane she sees him watching it depart.

She returns to being … wait a minute … Princess Diana (Did the writer have a crystal ball?)

Bizarre ending: a woman busker in Piccadilly Circus singing Santa Lucia.

This is what Helliwell’s film guide says:

An ambitious young woman deserts her journalist mentor for a company director, an effeminate photographer and an Italian prince. Fashionable mid-sixties concoction of smart swinging people and their amoral doings. Influential, put over with high style and totally tiresome in retrospect.
(Helliwell’s Film Guide … my bold letters)

I think that’s a brilliant summing up. I will say that its critical acclaim back in 1965 gave the team of Joseph Janni, John Schlesinger and Frederick Raphael the chance to make Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) with Julie Christie, a far far better film for me.

Julie Christie had to act passionately with Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey.  I’m a fan of Bogarde. For start he entered Belsen on the first day with allied troops as did my father. Secondly, his memoirs are wonderful reading. Third, he was a great actor. Dirk Bogarde insisted for years that his relationship with his male house partner was platonic, but it’s also said that his refusal to get married for appearances stopped him being a major Hollywood star. He never came out, though his orientation was accepted in the industry.

Laurence Harvey was married several times, but Frank Sinatra’s valet in his autobiography states that Harvey kept making passes at him. It was said he had a life long affair with his manager.

Then Roland Curram, as Malcolm, was married then, but came out as gay in the 1990s.

You have to admit she has the lines that suggest all this in the film, and everyone involved on set would have known it. It was hard to act passion in the situations, but the result was an Academy Award.

SOUNDTRACK

I can’t find that an album was ever released. John Dankworth has two tracks from Darling on his film music compilation (now only iTunes): Pavane for Diane and  Darling which is credited to Dirk Bogarde and which was released as a single.

It’s along the lines of Rex Harrison talking to the animals, Lee Marvin on Wanderin’ Star, or Telly  Savalas talking through If. But not as good.

I assume the cool jazzy themes at the party are his. Definitely old hat stuff for 1965. There’s also French pop music at the Paris party, which is never a good idea.

Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Bach appears, as does Santa Lucia, in both a full version and the busker version at the end.

The only 60s beat track is a girl group song played at a party near the end. I didn’t recognize it.

BLU-RAY:

These black and white restored blu-rays are crystal sharp. B & W comes out extremely well in high definition.

DIRK BOGARDE

Darling (1965)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
Accident (1967)

JULIE CHRISTIE  … see also:
The Fast Lady (1963)
Darling (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Petulia (1968)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)