Darling (1965) The New Morality of the 1960s

Celebrating its sixtieth anniversary with a return to selected cinemas from May 30th and a Blu-ray release by Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label on 16th June, Darling is John Schlesinger’s multi-Bafta and Academy Award winning 1965 starring the impossibly glamourous trio of Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, and Laurence Harvey. It tells the story of an ambitious young model and her shrewd and manipulative ascent to the heights of sixties society – but is all that she has ever dreamt of really all it’s is cracked up to be?

Written by Frederic Raphael (whose screenplay won both the Bafta and an Oscar) and from an idea by him, Schlesinger, and the film’s producer Joseph Janni, Darling went on to win the Best Picture Oscar that year and is a cynical and sharp-focused look at swinging London, made at a time when others were more or less happy to just enjoy the ride. Though its glamour is undeniably enticing and attractive, the film’s intentions are immediately apparent from the opening credits, which see posters depicting famine victims for an African aid charity replaced by an advertisement for the womens’ magazine-syndicated life story of our heroine, Diana Scott (Christie). This dichotomy is further explored later in the film (albeit earlier in Diana’s life) with a scene in which Diana is presenting a charity raffle for Africa to the hypocrisy of its high society benefactors who bemoan about the prize of an exotic holiday because they’ve just come back from there, and munch idly on sandwiches as a member of parliament delivers a speech testifying to the famine he has witnessed.

To make matters worse, this event sees young Black boys are dressed as 18th century pages, each tasked with filling the glasses and presenting the canapés to these exclusively white figures from “the great and the good”. In one disturbing sequence, one of the elite enquires of the event’s organiser and advertising executive Miles Brand (Harvey) if he could take one of the Black boys home with him. The implications of what he intends are all too clear, from the shifty lascivious glances he gives to one of them after Brand turns his suggestion down. It’s not the sort of moment one could imagine a film could casually drop into a scene now, but it speaks of the corruption and complict encouragement of such criminal behaviour that has always existed in the upper echelons of the establishment. It is the hypocrisy and triteness detailed in these two scenes which arguably nail Darling‘s caustic mood – it’s little wonder that, shortly after their first meeting, TV arts presenter Robert Gold (Bogarde) offers Diana the choice confectionary that is a packet of acid drops.

There’s something quite metatextual in Darling, and it’s specifically to do with the casting of Christie, who won an Oscar and a Bafta for her performance here. For a start, Christie had previously starred as a pretty provincial girl who escapes her humdrum existence for the bright lights of London in Schlesinger’s Billy Liar two years earlier, and her opening scene in the film – walking down the street, swinging her handbag and looking admirably carefree – is recycled here as the moment in which she was “discovered” by her future lover, Bogarde’s BAFTA winning turn as Robert Gold, who courts her opinion on youth matters for a vox pops segment he’s producing. This aspect in Christie’s casting is further utilised in the film, as Christie indeed represented the very same new type of woman – sexually and economically liberated – that Diana Scott was supposed to exemplify. Like her male counterparts Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Terence Stamp, Christie was radically different from the British movie stars of yesteryear, the Rank starlets and matinee idols of the 1950s, and Bogarde, himself a veteran of the Rank production line, is perfect casting as the older, more jaded Gold; a cultural broadcaster of a Monitor style show, dissatisified with the increasing centralisation of the arts to the London jet-set.

Billy Liar, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey, was a Woodfall production that explored the reality of working class life in the North of England, yet Darling, even as early as 1965, sees Schlesinger pointing towards a growing trend to move away from both that locale and style of the British New Wave in favour of something that is both more obviously and traditonally fashionable and unmistakably London-centric. Likewise, the decision to put Bogarde before real members of the public in the vox pops sequence and ask them what they believe is wrong in society, only for one answer to be homosexuality, feels pointedly meta given that both Bogarde and Schlesinger were gay men. The film’s gay character, Diana’s photographer confidant Malcolm is played by Roland Curram, an actor who was, at that point in time, married to fellow actor Sheila Gish. Though the pair would go on to have two children together, the actors Lou Gish and Kay Curram, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Curram himself finally came out as gay. Indeed it is said that Schlesinger had actually cast him in the role of Malcolm because he knew that Curram was gay and hoped that playing the character may make him face up to the fact.

A satirical gut-punch of a film, Darling is a movie about the new morality of the 1960s and the relaxing of inihibitions that led to an increasing divorce rate and the permissive society. As well as the liberation of affairs, marriage break-ups, and meaningless sex that Darling dramatises, it also focuses on homosexuality (specifically with the aforementioned Malcolm character) and abortion, at a point in time when both of those things were still illegal under UK law. In accurately capturing the spirit and mores of the decade, right at its half-way point, Schlesinger’s film depicts something of the rebellious instinct to kick out the fustiness and the hypocrisy of Macmillan’s patrician style governance which had included John Profumo’s scandalous affair with Christine Keeler. Refreshingly, it’s not a film that claims this generation has the answer, and it’s astute enough to know that those rebelling are likely to make all the same mistakes. Darling is a film that reproaches the vanities of its protagonists and, in turn, the new society in general.

It’s easy to condemn the central protagonist of Diana Scott for the vacuous and ambitious character she is. She leaves her rather ordinary young husband (T.R. Bowen) for the intellectual TV personality Robert Gold who, in turn, leaves his wife (Pauline Yates) and children, to set up home with her. But, as Diana secures modelling contracts and film work, she cannot resist the allure of more increasingly powerful men and it isn’t long before her eye is caught by the outgoing and modish playboy Brand. On a modelling trip to Paris, Brand introduces Diana to the anything goes jet-set of the city (including an early transwoman character, whom Brand refers to as a man) and the pair begin an affair that signifies the eventual breakdown of her relationship with Gold. Unhappy, Diana throws herself into her modelling work and long holidays, and tries to find some meaning in her life, though it seems that there’s relatively little substance to be found in a lifestyle that she has built on such vapid foundations.

There are shades of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in the later storyline of her courtship and marriage to an Italian prince, Cesare della Romita (José Luis de Vilallonga; in reality a Spanish nobleman and the 9th Marquess of Castellbell) but, if Diana ever hoped that untold wealth and privilege were the pinnacle of her ambitions, she is quickly brought down to earth. Virtually abandoned in her husband’s vast palazzo, her only recourse os to sell a life story as if her life is already done with, and the promise of it becoming tomorrow’s fish and chip paper is her only legacy. Ultimately, it’s as if Darling ensures Diana is left to face an empty future as penance for the transgressions it believes she has performed throughout the narrative. However, despite her admittedly mercenary nature, there’s equally a more sympathetic argument to be made for Diana in that, in her actions and her reliance on her looks and sexuality, she chose the only escape that was ever open to her. It’s arguably the fact that it is a man’s world that makes Diana who and what she is.

Studio Canal’s Blu-ray includes a host of extras such as a newly shot appreciation by Sofia Coppola, in which she discusses Darling‘s influence on her own films, including lifting one shot of Diana in the palazzo for Marie Antoinette, a new interview with Frederic Raphael on his experiences of writing the award-winning screenplay, and a new look at Julie Harris’ costumes for the film. There’s also an extract of an interview with John Schlesinger, and the usual stills galleries and trailers.

MARK’S ARCHIVE – DARLING (1965)