Who is this minx with the thirty-kilowatt smile? Christie is phenomenal here, creating an archetype of the modern neurotic. The extraordinary geometry of her face, depending on angle and lights, lands her somewhere between stunningly beautiful or disturbingly ugly, when dark inner thoughts rearrange her features into something repellent. She juggles a series of dual emotions, appearing radiantly happy while possessed of an unshakable despair.
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For the sixtieth anniversary of Darling (1965), this British New Wave defamation of Swinging London got the royal treatment. It received a theatrical run and a 4K Blu-ray release in the UK, with an interview with screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a mini-documentary on the costumes, plus stills, trailer, a 64-page illustrated booklet, and an introduction by Sofia Coppola on the influence Darling had on her career. Rialto Pictures is rereleasing Darling in the US, with a two-week run at the Film Forum in New York in October.
Once embraced in the US as a blistering cinematic essay on loneliness, alienation, and forever elusive happiness, it became disrespected over the years, its of-the-moment modishness aging badly. Even its director John Schlesinger spoke harshly of Darling in later years, despite its earlier international acclaim, breaking of taboos, and netting him his first Oscar nomination.
Darling is neatly wedged within the British New Wave. The kitchen sink film movement was well established with Look Back in Anger (1961), This Sporting Life (1963), A Taste of Honey (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963). Darling moved beyond the Northern grit of those films to savage the pretensions, vacuousness, and hedonism of Swinging London. Georgy Girl (1966), Alfie (1966), and Blow-Up (1968) soon followed.
Twenty-four-year-old Julie Christie plays “crumpet” Diana Scott, the second daughter of a rather bland and proper provincial middle-class family. While the elder daughter chooses a conventional path, rebellious Diana breaks away to London in search of fame and wealth. There she jumps at any advantage, be it romantic or professional – or both. She hastily marries a callow young man, becomes a bra model, goes on auditions, works charity functions, and stays alert to any chance at climbing the social ladder. This includes falling into an affair with a married man who leaves his family for her, then betraying him when someone more advantageous comes along. Easily bored, she has no grand plan, no inherent discipline or exceptional talent. She is rather a beautiful opportunist, lacking in self-awareness and driven by shiny things dangling in front of her. As she ruins several lives along the way, we easily conclude the film’s title is one of its many biting ironies. Diana is the sort to be called “darling” over an air kiss at a fancy soirée or art opening, but in her hollow heart she is anything but.
Rather unsurprisingly, Diana finds every step toward society’s idea of success a disappointment. In the final summary, Darling can be distilled to nothing more profound than “money and fame don’t buy happiness.” But considering the state of the world, doesn’t that simple lesson merit repeating? Such reduction does not lessen Darling’s impact or the sheer filmmaking exuberance on display. Darling still captivates because it illustrates an ageless truism with rampant stylishness and surgical exactitude. I’ll even go so far as to say there’s a little Diana in all of us.
The personnel on Darling is absolutely right. John Dankworth’s velvety score and Julie Harris’s chic Oscar-winning costumes are seductive enough to pull us into Diana’s world. A slightly seedy Dirk Bogarde as the man closest to anything resembling a love object for Diana gives a performance of quiet menace and self-loathing disguised as urbane bookishness. Laurence Harvey is appropriately reptilian as a better-connected and more transactional paramour. Schlesinger came from documentary filmmaking, and he gives Darling an almost newsreel aesthetic done in crisp black-and-white.
Darling is told in flashback via a media outlet peddling fantasies of the glamorous life. Diana becomes an unreliable narrator of her life’s story in an interview for a woman’s magazine, her voiceover lies and obfuscations contrary to what’s on screen. Schlesinger’s camera is quite fluid, and he composes the entire film with short abruptly changing scenes, effectively splintering a conventional film narrative. He and editor James Clark create a visual metaphor of Diana’s uncharted caprice and codify a late ’60s jittery film trend at the same time.
Schlesinger, a gay man, infused Darling with a queerness both rare and progressive, giving his film yet another layer. Diana’s one uncomplicated relationship is with her gay friend Malcolm, played with relaxed charm by Roland Curram. Malcolm is unapologetic of his homosexuality, though it was then illegal in England. He and Diana even swap a hunky bisexual waiter on their “sexcapade” to Capri. He’s a quietly revolutionary character in English-language film, and foreshadows the director’s more lauded explorations of homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).
Schlesinger’s quiet cool audacity permeates Darling. Beyond the charting of a playgirl’s rise to self-imposed palatial imprisonment, he takes fast and frequent satiric shots at society’s hypocrisies and gross materialism. And somehow – miraculously – he sneaks in abortion, cunnilingus, lesbianism, cross-dressing, nudity, and group sex, though the latter is depicted in a clumsy sequence all too imitative of Fellini. But he’s usually in superb harmony with screenwriter Raphael, an Oscar winner here who has a sharp ear for the argot of various milieus, be they galleries, bedrooms, the streets, or the home of an Italian prince.
Timing is everything. Thirteen years of Tory government ended as Darling was in production in late 1964. Youth culture exploded, with relaxing attitudes on music, fashion, and sex. Observed historian Shawn Levy: “For a few years, the most amazing thing in the world was to be British, creative, and young.” But both Schlesinger and Raphael saw something rotten in the sudden ascension of youth culture as personified by Diana. That would have made for a rich enough study in itself, but the filmmakers go further. As she attaches herself to ever higher levels of social prestige, she and the other females of Darling face the common obstacles of their sex. In our brief acquaintance with Robert’s wife, she’s a disheveled hausfrau. Diana’s sister is trapped in her own suburban torporific hell. As Diana is blessed (cursed?) with unusual beauty, she is forever objectified. Modeling and acting are options for her, but corporate management and directing aren’t. At last she reaches the top when marrying into an Italian royal family, but she’s more trapped than ever, the decorative side piece to her busy well-traveled new husband. “I hate convention,” she says to Robert at their meeting, yet she becomes the ultimate in convention, living many people’s idea of a storybook life. By then we know the colossal price of Diana enacting that public lie.
Schlesinger doesn’t highlight sexism as blatantly as he moralizes and punishes Diana. He never implies that sexism justifies Diana’s bad behavior, but it is a devastating undercurrent of Darling nonetheless. It’s there in the film’s last confounding image, as a toothless street woman sings “Santa Lucia” while being ignored by the crowd. As Schlesinger explained it, “The awful isolation of this poor creature singing her heart out in a language passerbys do not understand” became “a symbol of Diana, who had failed to communicate with the people in her world.”
Bogarde and Harvey had major established careers in 1965, but Christie was a new face. If Darling still punches, inestimable credit goes to her. Lost to time is the original impact of her unique screen presence. But an impact it had, garnering her various critics’ awards, and the BAFTA and Oscar for Best Actress. With one swing of her purse or toss of her dark blonde tresses, Christie wiped away the more formal Deborah Kerrs, Margaret Leightons, and Jean Simmonses of a previous generation in favor of something skittish, uncertain, and bracingly new. It’s arguable whether she paved the way for later breakthrough performances by compatriots Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson, and Vanessa Redgrave, but she certainly contributed to a welcoming environment for them.
Who is this minx with the thirty-kilowatt smile? Christie is phenomenal here, creating an archetype of the modern neurotic. The extraordinary geometry of her face, depending on angle and lights, lands her somewhere between stunningly beautiful or disturbingly ugly, when dark inner thoughts rearrange her features into something repellent. She juggles a series of dual emotions, appearing radiantly happy while possessed of an unshakable despair. She’s calculating as well as clueless. Intriguing but insipid. She has a frighteningly authentic nervous breakdown in which Diana disassembles, reassembles, then disassembles again before finally going numb. She’s dressed in’60s Zeitgeist but strangely prophetic. She views fame as its own reward. In that respect, she’s relevant in an age of reality tv stars, influencers, social networking viral sensations, and anyone seeking logged-on celebrity without really trying.
Darling remains a film of singular design and power precisely because it’s dated. But in style and execution only. Darling is an artifact that not only embodies an era but comments incisively on it. Its deeper truths on the dehumanizing complexity of modern life and the brutal punishments of exploitation echo quite loudly to 2025.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
