Films and Filming – Oct 1965

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DARLING…

George Angell looks at the British sweet life…

Directed by John Schlesinger.
Produced by Joseph Jaani.
Screenplay by Frederic Raphael.
Director of photography, Ken Higgins.
Editor, James Clark.
Music, John Dankworth.
Art director, Ray Simm.
A Joseph Janni production for Anglo Amalgamated, distributed by Warner-Pathe. British. Cert X. 127 mins.

Robert, DIRK BOGARDE;
Miles, LAURENCEHARVEY;
Diana,JULIE CHRISTIE;
Malcolm, ROLAND CURRAM;
Sean Martin, ALEX SCOTT;
Alec Prosser-Jones, BASIL HENSON;
Felicity Prosser-Jones HELEN LINDSAY;
William Prosser-Jones, TYLER BUTTERWORTH;
Estelle Gold, PAULINE YATES;
Lord Grant, PETER BAYLISS.

This is an ambitious new film by John Schlesinger which examines the more seamy side of Britain’s affluent society ‘a society which sets no value on the word ‘darling’ because it no longer has any values of its own’. It’s a British ‘Dolce Vita’ but with little of the brilliant characterisation, the sledge-hammer satire, and the poetic symbolism of Federico Fellini.

Darling is the auto-biography of Diana, a girl from the Chelsea upper crust – a bright, beautiful, sexy, unstable amoral girl, who drifts from man to man, and from one lover’s bed to another. She is successful as a model and a star of television commercials but becomes increasingly purposeless, neurotic and unhappy. She leaves her young and unsophisticated husband for Robert (Dirk Bogarde), a more mature, suave, intelligent man, who is a television reporter. She separates Robert from his wife and children and lives with him for a while, then as her face becomes a familiar image of sophistication on magazine covers and posters, she becomes bored. She then strays into the bed of Miles (Laurence Harvey), a worldly, callous, depraved top-executive of the firm whose products Diana advertises. From then onwards she drifts further and further away from reality and a purpose in life. She goes to Paris with Miles end shares his tastes for sexual orgies. She goes to Capri with Malcolm, a homosexual photographer; in a moment of unhappiness and frustration she goes to bed with his boyfriend. Then suddenly luck smiles on her again. She meets an Italian prince (Jose Luis De Vilalonga), a widower with six children and he proposes marriage. After a period of hesitation, during which she returns to Miles her perverted top executive, Diana eventually marries the prince. But in the stately home of the Italian nobleman, with six children, the title of princess and all the money in the world Diana finds neither happiness nor peace of mind. The prince gives her no real affection and in a state of semi-hysteria Diana flies to London and makes a last attempt at reconciliation with Robert, her only real life-anchor. Robert sleeps with her but insultingly refuses to take her back. Finally, Diana after shedding a few bitter tears puts on a bold, painted face, and returns to Italy to rejoin her husband thus becoming the prisoner of a world she had thought she had conquered.

Darling is one of those films, that halfway through you begin to wonder the raison d’etre of the whole story. The acting is uniformly accomplished; the photography, most of it done on location in London, Florence and Capri by Kenneth Higgins is excellent: the music by Johnny Dankworth is just right. You admire the technique of John Schlesinger; you praise tho impeccable performances of Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey; you love Julie Christie’s warm personality, her lovely face and her luscious, expressive mouth; and yet as you sit through the 127 minutes of Darling – which by present standards is not too long, you sense a weariness gradually creeping upon you. Why? Because your participation, as you sit in your theatre armchair, is dispassionate and detached; because the story fails to involve you emotionally, fails to establish a sympathetic rapport between you and any of the film characters. Most of them, with the exception perhaps of the part played by Dirk Bogarde are so shallow, so uninspiring, that you cannot identify yourself with them. They s~em to be contrived caricatures intended to anchor to the centre-piece which is Darling. But the tragedy is that Darling herself provides no harbour, no anchorage, because she herself is hardly a credible person. As a result you are charmed, intrigued, amused, by parts of the film, but you are never engrossed or captivated by the whole of it. I was certainly not shocked or disturbed, as I should have been, by a film which I presume sets out to indict the empty way of life of London’s smart set.

But the film has its gripping moments. It has many laughs, and some wonderful ‘candid’ shots of people – reminiscent of Terminus, which was also photographed by Kenneth Higgins. It has a clever satire on newsreel commentaries; an amusing and ingeniously constructed sexual-exhibition scene, and an intensely funny and moving drunken scene, during which Diana and Malcolm pour wine into a bowl of goldfish – the poor fish, of course, die of alcoholic poisoning and are later ‘buried’ ceremoniously in the Thames.

The film is full of invention and imagination, perhaps too much of it. If only it had a stronger story-line and more substantial characters, its point might have been sharper and more bitter.