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NOT SO DARLING Absolutely true the critics were gunning for Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili long before it opened. The advance publicity on the picture was negative, not because anyone outside of Edwards, stars Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson and the heads at Paramount had viewed major footage, but primarily due to Edwards and the studio having locked horns during production and rumors of dissatisfaction with the final cut, nearly the identical skirmishes waged over The Great Race a few years before. (The very limited attribute in that one is how good Natalie Wood looks in those improbable Edith Head outfits.) Most quarrels over cuts are predictors of less than satisfying results and the big league critics—still licking their chops over Julie’s previous bomb Star!—fell all over themselves with strong slams and predictions of Maria Poppins as finished. Making matters worse, the original yesteryear advertising made viewers not want to see it and the Grand Prix-like poster art inside the marquee at left became the second failing effort to recover its $25 million cost. Decidedly anachronistic, Darling Lili is probably an altogether terrible picture, with Julie playing of all things an English pris version of Mati Hari and Rock a WWI flying ace. OTOH, the perverse thoughts viewers will have about this pairing are enough to suffer through it. (A limited plus: those hard of hearing won’t need to worry about missing Rock hollering and Julie screaming at each other.) Having gone hugely over-budget, we can’t really tell from what we see on screen where the money went. According to know-it-alls, expensive delays due to student riots and general strikes in Paris in the spring of 1968 necessitated another location shift, this time to Brussels. (The production originally started in Ireland but early-on a studio exec objected and filming moved to Paris.) Looking at Rock, who’s often puffy and haggard, with stained teeth in need of whitening and hair in need of a trim, we could believe Edwards didn’t spend enough on retakes. Likely no improvement: during both filming and delays, Rock spent many of his nights in smoky bars and then at les bains gay. Dismissive of the fact no studio head forced him to make a comedy with music having neither much fun nor fresh songs in it, Edwards’s animus against the studio became the subject of his later and sour S.O.B., turning Julie’s ample tits into its only attraction, yet, as irony, she’s more amusing letting loose with a defiant G-rated striptease as the only good moment in Darling Lili. Intended to be a reserved-seater, plans changed when Paramount became increasingly nervous with Edwards’s flimsy product and Star! took its embarrassing dive at the box office. The excruciating theme and exit music by Henry Mancini are sung by his own chorus sounding an awful lot like those barf-inducing Ray Conniff Singers. In 1990, Edwards provided TNT with a “director’s cut” running 114 minutes. Original release, with overture and exit music, runs 143 minutes and airs infrequently on TCM. With Jeremy Kemp, Lance Percival, Jacques Marin, Michael Witney. Michel Legrand the translator for French lyrics; Hermes Pan the choreographer; Edwards and William Peter Blatty wrote the script. In Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (Opening multiple on 8/7/1970, the nearest to the loop was the northside’s Lakeshore, with no additional data available. One of few roadshow engagements, it opened at L.A.’s Pacific Cinerama Dome on 6/23/1970, running 20 weeks.) Oscar noms for best original song (“Whistling in the Dark”), original musical score and costume design.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
