Mata Hardly

Yes. Yes. DARLING LILI is very interesting. I didn’t feel any of the bits worked, exactly, but they were interesting bits.

It’s kind of fascinating that in 1968, when they were planning this film, they thought Julie Andrews would be good casting as a German spy. Or they thought that would be a good change of pace for her, anyway. And within her range. And it might be, but then you’d have to do something with the idea.

We don’t at any point in the film consider WHY Lili Smith is a spy — we’re told she’s half-German, and that’s it. She also has a devoted German spymaster, Jeremy Kemp (very good perf: obviously he’s in love with her). But there’s nothing else. As far as we can tell, she doesn’t ever question it.

Lance Percival rehearses Blake Edwards’ bit from his special Oscar acceptance.

(But what I viewed is the 2hr 16 min director’s cut available to me, not the 190 min roadshow version. The version I saw needs MORE shortening to move efficiently — but maybe if you added back at least some of the footage Edwards himself deleted, it would attain virtues more important than efficiency.)

It’s commonplace for these kind of stories, going back at least as far as DISHONORED, to feature characters throwing aside patriotism in the name of love, but we have no idea if Lili is patriotic about Germany while she’s going around singing patriotic songs about England as part of her cover. So does her apparent change of heart mean anything?

But the other side of the conflict, the love story, is equally undercooked. Rock Hudson shows up with a gypsy band to take Julie for a picnic at 3 a.m., which is quite dashing. But then we never hear them talk. What do they have in common? Can we watch this relationship develop and get a sense of when the lady spy’s performance of romance starts to shade into the real thing? Never happens. Instead there’s a long farce scene of her mercilessly prickteasing him and trying to provoke him into giving away military secrets. While, in a node to past Blake Edwards, not one but two Incompetent French Detectives bumble about on the roof in the pouring rain. Nice to see Jacques Marin, who seems to be turning up in everything I watch this year, and Andre Maranne (so good as Herbert Lom’s assistant in the later PANTHER films), but when you have TWO I.F.D.s as a team, maybe some of Clouseau’s desperate inner tension is lost (pace Sellers, he KNOWS he’s an idiot, but he’s trying all the time to stop everyone else noticing — and because he’s an idiot, he never gives up, even when it should be obvious that the gig is up).

The funny thing in this film is the perpetually squiffy Lance Percival as T.C. Carstairs. Rock Hudson at one point says his name is Twombly-Crouch, but then he never says it again and my dream of hearing Rock Hudson repeatedly say Twombly-Crouch is cruelly shattered. Percival gets the best dialogue — a perfect Wodehousian pastiche of blithering idiocy fighting its way through ferocious affability and a haze of alcohol. An entire film about Twombly-Crouch would be nice and now I have to see more Percival, I’ve neglected him. I don’t think I even noticed he’d died in 2015.

Remarkable how Edwards, at various points in his life an alcoholic, a pill-popper, a compulsive philanderer, is just as gleeful in his drunk jokes as his nervous breakdown jokes and his physical pain jokes.

I was a bit surprised to see Julie Andrews do a striptease here. I knew that S.O.B. was heavily inspired by this production but I still wasn’t expecting a flash frame of Mary Poppins’ left nipple. I put it to you that nobody expects that, ever. Except possible Blake Edwards, but even then I wouldn’t speak with certainty.

Maybe the edgier bit is Andrews WATCHING a striptease. Very intently.

Edwards certainly liked spending money! Although he didn’t want to film in Europe owing to weather considerations. But it seems like Ireland was the only place to shoot WWI planes, and not many places look like Paris. Although, owing to rioting French students, a lot of this was shot in Brussels. Doubtful if studio sets would have been cheaper.

Anyway, the massive scale of the production, with Edwards’ typically elegant filming style, results in every scene packing a lot of lustre. There are very good bits. But because the characters are basically puppets and nothing is at stake — the outcome of the war never felt urgent or important to me — this is another war where nobody gets hurt — no story momentum is built up. And whenever a problem appears — how can Julie spy on Rock for both sides at once? — it’s dropped while we get a song, an aviation sequence, and perhaps a reprise. (It’s not clear why the Incompetent French Detectives never consider that Julie might be the female enemy spy confidante of Rock they’re seeking. Well, they ARE I.F.D.s, I guess.)

Apart from being a German agent who betrays her lover to get secrets from him, Julie’s character also frames him and an entirely innocent stripper for treason, which you would expect would get them shot. To save them, when she has a change of heart, she flees to Switzerland, which it’s argued MIGHT save Rock, though this sounded ropey to me. Then there’s an action sequence involving planes and a train, which seemed wrong from the start, since again Rock and Julie are not free to interact — he’s up there and she’s down here. Well, I say “here,” I mean on the way to Swistzerland.

It’s not even a proper musical, in a way. The numbers are all performed on stage, when actually bursting into song in the middle of a scene might help this movie maintain its souffle-like attitude of floating above the mire of war. And might help bind the songs to the action. In CABARET, which makes the same exact approach seem brilliant and innovative, the songs seem to comment on the action and are perfectly placed in the story. Here, they always feel like interruptions, except for maybe the saucy song which makes a key character point and may be one of the rare instances on record of nudity being essential to the plot.

This film just missed being the perfect thing to have on a marquee in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Robert Evans was too busy messing about with it so it didn’t come out until the following year. But if you want to watch the death of Old Hollywood (“Even the way it died is beautiful” ~ David Lynch), here it is. Even though the talents involved were not old and would go on to do lots more — this KIND of film was finished.

Lucifer

Started watching DARLING LILI — I’m on a Blake Edwards kick. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY? led to THE PARTY which led to SKIN DEEP and before you know it… well, I don’t know what shows more extreme depths of morbid curiosity that watching SKIN DEEP. (It was kind of rewarding, though.)

So, DL begins with Julie Andrews, Edwards’ wife of course, singing a lovely number called “Whistling in the Dark” (not the They Might Be Giants tune) amid dazzling anamorphic flares and halations upon the lens. It’s like a portal into J.J. Abrams’ wet dreams.

Then she launches into “It’s a Long Way to Tiperary,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” which has the line “While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag…” — a Lucifer being a brand of match and a fag being a cigarette. Anyhow, on that last syllable, THIS happens ~

Timing Rock’s credit to land exactly on the word “fag” — it CAN’T be an accident, and even if it were, who’s minding the store? Given that Edwards suffered continual interference from Paramount and was basically locked out of the edit (his own, decades-later director’s cut is 29 minutes shorter than the roadshow version), this is either the work of some not-so-merry prankster or a fuck-you Mona Lisa mustache doodled by the director on his own creation. But aren’t there people paid to look at edits? Surely the word in question is MORE likely to pop out for an American viewer?

Edwards’ work tends to be quite gay-friendly — lots of sympathetic gay characters, jokes which are smutty without being nasty. There were even longstanding rumours — well, more like speculations –about the Edwards-Andrews marriage at least partly being one of convenience. One can even, without too much strain, read movies like 10, THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN and SKIN DEEP as “protest too much” smokescreens on the one hand and gender-swapped confessions on the other.

Who knows? With regard to this unique jape-slur, Edwards is gone, as is editor Peter Zinner, who only cut two unsuccessful Edwards films before going on to THE GODFATHER.

I seem to recall somebody — and it may have been the less-than-reliable F. Gwyneplaine MacIntyre — telling me something about “Edwards and Andrews fag-baiting Rock Hudson on DARLING LILI” — but that may have been an obscure reference merely to this credit, or just the usual MacIntyre baloney. Anybody know anything?

Side by Side

Some people have died, and even though I don’t do obituaries here, really, I should mark their passing. Jean Darling, star of OUR GANG comedies, whom I sat next to at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in a seat I sort of scammed my way into through a kind of willful obtusity, passed away in September, aged ninety-three.

“Comedy is tragedy.”

And now Mike Sutton has died, much too young. I got to know Mike properly when he contacted me on Facebook, worried that we had both been commissioned to write essays for Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray of John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS, and hadn’t known about each other so hadn’t conferred. I told him my piece was mainly about Frankenheimer and he was relieved because his piece was mainly about the book-to-film adaptation.

Now I hold the disc, and booklet, in my hands, and though there are a couple of overlaps — neither one of us could resist talking about how apposite Rock Hudson is in the role of a reinvented man, a human facade — I feel the essays compliment each other well. I’m pretty pleased with how mine came out. Mike’s is brilliant and heartbreaking. I’d known from his Facebook posts that he was battling oesophageal cancer, but didn’t realize the fight was this close to over. Knowing that, while you read his piece, which is full of sorrow and anger, like the film, like life, makes it all the more powerful.

“Seconds. Second lives, second chances, seconds ticking away in our hopelessly fragile, trivial little lives.”

That’s the first line. The last, describing Hudson staring out the window of an airliner, is ~

“Even before his new life collapses in on itself, one feels that he is already dying, looking at an empty sky, in the words of Philip Larkin, he is staring into “the deep blue air which shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”