"I like making films that have question marks in them and are not all tied up beautifully with a pink ribbon, even though that's what the audience seems to want, and if you give it to them there's more assurance of commercial success, perhaps. But that's never the way I've seen life or reflected life in what I want to put on the screen."
~ John Schlesinger

John Schlesinger was a key figure in the New British cinema that arose in the late 1950s and early 1960s and had extensive experience in TV and documentary work before his first feature, A Kind of Loving. He followed it with the Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie hit, Billy Liar and stuck with Christie for his third feature, the remarkable Darling. Schlesinger and his producer Joseph Janni approached novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, about an idea to investigate the glamourous façade of Swinging London via a successful model/actress. The screenplay eventually focused on a Twiggy type model/actress caught in the whirlwind of a cultural sea change on the back of Beatlemania where stolid Old England threw off its shackles and started to party hard.

Diana Scott is a star. In voiceover we hear her telling her story to a reporter as we flashback on moments of her life from childhood to the moment she came into public view with TV reporter Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). Diana and Robert are soon having an affair but both leave their spouses and set up in an apartment together and set their sights on a happy future. Robert continues his work as a social and arts commentator while Diana pursues a career as a model. She finds moderate fame as the ‘Honeyglow’ girl, a cosmetics brand owned by playboy Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), who drags Diana into his decadent lifestyle. Robert and Diana breakup but Miles is not husband material and on a working holiday in Italy Diana is wooed by a wealthy Italian prince (José Luis de Vilallonga) and marries him in an effort to find contentment.

The biting tone of the film is established from the opening credits where we see a poster hanger gluing large sheets on an advertising hoarding portraying the beautiful Diana and a promo for a magazine interview ‘My Story’ over the previous images of starving African children. Schlesinger reveals the Diana and Robert relationship subtly before it’s revealed to be an illicit affair and Raphael’s economy of dialogue is matched by Schlesinger’s deft touch – the secret lovers meet and Robert sighs, ‘I don’t know what to do… I mean I know… I don’t…’ She replies, ‘I know.’ Once she possesses Robert she becomes bored and restless, her absentmindedly stabbing at goldfish in a bowl with a pencil captures the lack of comprehension of consequences from actions and soon that plays out with her affair with Miles. Miles opens the door to upper class privilege and, as it turns out, their debauchery as Diana plays the game of supporting charity while chasing distraction and amusement, of which Miles is a past master – summed up by a socialite woman saying, ‘Miles, you always were a man after your own heart.’ 

Schlesinger tapped into the zeitgeist at a remarkable moment in British history, just as the empire was fading post WWII and a cultural revolution was taking shape from the youth movement born from Beatlemania, one that would soon feed the global counterculture rupture. Raphael examines the scene by contrasting the old values of Robert and his connection to respectable literature like the elderly establishment author Willet, who befriends Diana on a visit and the vulgar new money represented by Miles. Diana is torn between the two worlds and of course settles on a solution that involves both respectability and money by marrying an Italian prince. In the process she throws away her ‘true love’ of Robert and comes to regret it, but in a last ditch attempt to patch it up she confronts the residual bitterness she’d created and the impossibility of reconciliation. The emptiness and Diana's butterfly nature of alighting on to the brightest flower near her for sustenance is counterpointed briefly by her flirting with religion in Rome, the religion of her future husband, but in that too she proves ill-suited to commitment. 

John Schlesinger wanted Shirley MacLaine in the role of Diana, possibly with an eye on the American market, but Julie Christie had starred for him in his breakthrough feature and would again in his next, Far From The Madding Crowd (with a Raphael adaption of Thomas Hardy’s novel) and she was the perfect choice in retrospect. Christie embodies the lost girl who should have ‘had it all’ based on the Swinging London mindset – fame and money and a dazzling career – but it has come at a cost and she has fought ennui at every stage. She shows a disturbing jealousy, ‘I’ve never been the jealous type’ pleads her disingenuous voiceover, undermined by the viewer seeing a binocular wearing Diana stalk Robert at home with his wife and children. Diana’s cynicism and blind ambition is expressed in her getting an abortion after she becomes pregnant in order to not damage her modelling career, compromising her relationship with reliable Robert.

Frederic Raphael was fresh from writing a great script for Clive Donner’s excellent Nothing But The Best, a biting black comedy which starred Alan Bates and Denholm Elliot that was too far ahead of the curve to find an audience. Raphael went on to a distinguished writing career with a handful of brilliant screenplays peppered throughout, and Darling was one of his best, winning the BAFTA for Best British Screenplay. What Raphael brought to all of his work was a biting wit and deep insight into human relationships with fluid dialogue delivered with an economy of language. Sardonic humour is a strength too, witnessed in the scene of Diana’s seduction by Miles – Diana is on a parking meter when she rushes into Miles’ flat, the seduction continues and Schlesinger cuts to the parking meter going into overtime, when in close up Miles’s head disappears to the lower places of Diana’s body (in an era where oral sex was rarely shown or even hinted at) Diana looks ecstatic and Schlesinger cuts to the parking meter saying ‘penalty.’ The sex party in Paris shows Diana to be an amateur in terms of debauchery and her discomfort is expertly investigated by Schlesinger and the upper class depravity and hypocrisy skewered by Raphael with razor precision.

Schlesinger not only gets a brilliant performance from Christie, who deservedly won an Academy Award and BAFTA for her work, but also from the mature Dirk Bogarde who had left his matinee idol days long behind, and even from the hard-to-like Laurence Harvey, who shines as a narcissistic playboy. Harvey was a limited actor I think, but here he is perfectly cast and ideal as Miles, while Bogarde was certainly one of the most gifted actors of his generation and on a run that would see him make a series of remarkable films with brilliant directors like Joseph Losey, John Frankenheimer, Luchino Visconti, Alain Resnais, rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bertrand Tavernier. Bogarde’s Robert anchors the film in the better angels of decency and morality, until he decides to give Diana a dose of her own medicine, a note of cynicism that was impossible in most Hollywood films of the era and Bogarde is supple enough to cover every nuance.

Darling has aged much better than many contemporary films of the time and looks like a clear eyed and stinging social satire of a changing culture in a pivotal modern period. Its attitudes to homosexuality and sex are very modern (homosexuality was illegal in Britain at the time it was made) and the style and depth of the piece remains engaging and impressive. The film is shot in a no-nonsense way by Schlesinger’s documentarian colleague Ken Higgins and has a wonderful score by John Dankworth, suitably jazzy and not dated by lamely trying to replicate the British beat band phenomenon of the time. John Shlesinger would make one more decidedly English film, again with the luminous Christie in the lead, before heading for Hollywood and the glories of Midnight Cowboy. Darling remains one of his very best.