SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

gahnsuksah Definitely a period film for those interested in identifying old cars, hairstyles and suchlike. One gets used to the black and white. Script full of silly egoistic banter with rather poor jokes (to us, anyway). I suppose the 60s were a bit like this movie but a lot seems just plain silly. A lot of facial expression shots that don't quite fit with the story development. Continuity suffers as a result of this. Was Julie Christie well cast? The Diana personality does not really fit her good looks and class - and she certainly comes over as a rather greedy and ignorant person who does not know herself at all. Her looking at herself in the mirror whilst kissing Robert (Dirk Bogarde) taught her nothing. Lousy relationships and trouble all round.

SnoopyStyle Diana Scott (Julie Christie) climbs the ladder as a model and an aspiring actress. She marries young to Tony Bridges. Then she leaves him when for TV interviewer Robert Gold who was also married at the time. Then she has a relationship with advertising executive Miles Brand. Then she marries Prince Cesare della Romita after meeting him in Italy. Only her newest marriage isn't a happy one.Julie Christie won the Oscar for best actress. She puts in a wide ranging performance. It was also a big year for her with her other movie 'Doctor Zhivago'. The movie also won for best original screenplay. I'm not as impressed with that. It just seems like writer Frederic Raphael jammed everything from the tabloid pages into this movie. The black and white also took me by surprise a little. The cover of the DVD is in color. I think color would have worked much better for this character. Julie Christie does some good work but I don't see much else in this.

secondtake Darling (1965)A black and white, Mod London romance and its aftermath, over and over, with all the tumult and glitz of the times. The events race forward and create a real tornado of activity, centering around one woman, Diana Scott, who is perfectly played by Julie Christie. Diana is as charming and beautiful as the actress who plays her, and she is drawn to men, to the movies, to modeling, and generally to success and ruin, up and down, in a wild ride.British movies had a vigorous neo-realism (British New Wave) movement in the late 50s and early 60s, and by the time of this film it had segued into a purely celebratory pop mode, cashing in on the times, and the British Invasion in music. "Darling" is kind of in both worlds, I think, the same way the 1964 "A Hard Days Night" is in both, though they are very different films. But there is a frankness to the filming that belies the (at first) entertaining and largely fictional subject. And unlike the earlier neo-real innovators ("Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner" etc.), the focus here is on a privileged class, and on the rising fortunes of Diana as she moves from one relationship to another.The filming gives these seemingly flighty, alternately glib and sad events a somberness they need. Director John Schlesinger was a British New Wave upstart, and would later do the American masterpiece "Midnight Cowboy," which might be said to have the same mixture of inventive fiction and believable raw realism.Diana is a superficial woman who cashes in on her good looks and fun temperament, and her many men never seem to mind at first. She leads, but she also get towed along, falling in love, never seeming to be quite as happy as she should. Indeed, the movie begins with her explaining through a voice-over her inner yearning for what matters in life, since it's so hard to otherwise tell. Toward the end, in Italy (after England and France had been exhausted), she says to her newest man, "If I could just feel complete." And she means it. But then, in the next scenes, she's having fun again, telling lies and losing her bearings.Christie is a marvel, really, even though you might just say she's playing herself (though not acting out the events in her life, we hope). This is her breakout film (along with her next film, "Dr. Zhivago"), and she really does typify the Mod English girl, fresh and carefree. There is even a very brief nude shot, from behind, that is a sign of mid-60s liberation in both life and in filmmaking. Dirk Bogarde is certainly excellent, too, and subtle, and indeed the whole cast is first rate, maybe because everyone is playing their contemporary selves with fictional names.So the movie is terrific, even if it sometimes seems to keep meandering through the paces over the whole two hours. It wraps you in its world. Inevitably the outcome is as somber as the greys of the filming. What else would happen to someone who can't find love, or happiness, or meaning? It's impossible to really feel complete, as a person, if you search outside yourself too much, and hers is a superficial world of her own making, Diana is a superficial woman with lots of unexplored depth.The writing here is totally first rate, the filming is first rate, the editing and pace first rate. It's simply a well made movie about a contemporary dilemma. "Thank God it's never too late," she says at the end, and in fact you know that she should really say, "God, everything stays the same." I don't think there is meant to be an echo here of Grace Kelly in particular, but there is a similar arc to Diana's career (and her name, of course, predicts a later Princess Diana). Diana's apparent sexual freedom is laden with that old convention of marriage (which she early on wisely says she doesn't want) and so some extent she can be a freewheeling young woman partly because she is always taken care of, and increasingly so. An interesting take on whether this is an accurate picture at all of the times is in this short apolitical article: www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10813.This movie ranks, for me, almost up there with "Alfie" and "Georgie Girl" (two of my favorites) as a look at the times in England. Honest, sometimes disturbing, and artistically considered. Don't miss it.

patrick powell It is not original to observe that nothing dates faster than last year's fashion, but in the case of John Schlesinger's Darling that observation is very apt. Time has not been kind to this three-Oscars winner, and as the years roll by, time gets ever more cruel. There are some films from 40/50/60 years ago which still stand up, for many reasons, each time you see them, but Darling is left far behind. Made in 1965, I suspect it was seen as 'daring' and 'modern' with its, for the time, open attitude to sex and its less than discreet treatment of homosexuality. The film was released two years before gay sex was decriminalised in Britain, but gayness permeates the whole enterprise. Schlesinger, Dirk Bogarde and Roland Curram were all gay, and even Laurence Harvey, who in his private life was also something of a heterosexual wolf and married three times, also batted for both sides and all too often comes over as camp a row of tents. The film is credited as being the brainchild of Schlesinger, Joseph Janni, the producer and Frederic Raphael, who also wrote the screenplay, and one feels that they were rather taken with the idea of being 'shocking'. Elsewhere this has been described as a 'satire' on swinging London, but if that is the case, whatever satire was intended pretty much passed me by. The trouble is that despite its three Oscars - for Julie Christie, for Raphael's script and for the costumes - it just isn't very good. The whole enterprise is two dimensional and there is no character development at all. We care not a jot for the characters (except, in my case, the Italian prince. There might be hints that he, too, is a bit of a cad and no one in his right mind would buy his explanation that when he is in Rome, he will be sharing a mug of Horlicks with his mum and watching the ten o'clock news. Nevertheless, I did feel sorry for him that he had landed himself with such a high-maintenance new bride.) Darling herself - Diana Scott - comes over as rather too nice to be the amoral model sleeping her way to the top, or if not 'nice' then 'well brought up'. You get the feeling that her idea of doing something really bad would be to forget to write a thank-you note. She also seems rather too dim to be a scheming hussy, and I don't for a second buy the idea that she was merely interested in her modelling career. She had wannabe shires housewife written all over her. As for Dirk Bogarde, am I really the only guy to think that he is all too often very wooden, that when he acts, he is all to obviously 'acting'? He was perfect for all those lightweight Doctor comedies which kept the British nation quiet in the Fifties, but when he branched out into 'serious' roles, he couldn't quite seem to cut it. It will not have been public knowledge at the time that Bogarde, too, was gay - as a former matinée idol, he had a formidable female following - but he remains wholly unconvincing as a 'wronged man'. And furthermore as a cad arts journalist who selfishly jettisoned his wife and three children to shack up with a spoilt model, he does not deserve too much of our sympathy. Every time he got upset or angry with Julie Christie, he just seemed like a middle-aged queen in a spat with his lover. Laurence Harvey, comes over rather better as the cynical and amoral seducer, but he, too, has too many quotable lines to make the part feel normal. (Incidentally, Janni was Italian and his background was much in the realistic school of film-making, so it is ironic that, despite its would-be trendy facade, Darling's heritage all to often comes over as the brittle, old-fashioned middle class stage drama the kitchen sink school was intended to usurp.) Raphael's script is far too full of attempted epigrams and quotable quotes. It is far, far too self-conscious and clever-clever for its own good. I only watched this film because I got hold of a free DVD of it at the office, and I don't feel my life would have been any the poorer had I not seen it. It simply isn't half as good in retrospect as it was thought to be at the time. These things happen. Sad, but true. If this comes your way, either on TV or stuck inside your daily newspaper, first of all see whether you might not have something better to do. Don't be fooled by the Oscars. Oh, and why is sodomy and odd sexual practice always associated with 'being sophisticated'. Does that mean the rest of us are plain old unsophisticated hicks?