Darling [DVD] [1965]

The film involves its audience with genuine appeal to our emotions and intellect, rather than in the manipulative manner of many more recent movies. Darling makes us think and challenges us to feel. Although very much a reflection of its time, Darling still has very much to say today. It is sad, therefore, that some of those involved in its making tend to distance themselves from it now. Maybe their subsequent careers have made them resemble the film's targets. If nothing else, Darling is populated by real people - some of whom are sometimes uncomfortably realistic.

It is perhaps difficult to realise now how shocking a character Julie Christie was portraying at the time - in those unenlightened days when free love and liberated women were only just beginning to surface into public awareness. The audience was asked to feel sympathy for this middle-class girl who bed-hopped her way from model to princess with barely a hint of conscience. Perhaps she was intended to be another British anti-hero - a female version of Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton or Arthur Seaton. Or maybe she was the prophetic face of the future - the sixties symbol that everything was changing. Whatever the intention, the character of Diana Scott made a definite impact, both on the men in her life and on the audiences who watched her with a mixture of fascination, disbelief, and (quite possibly) a touch of envy.

The film's solid foundation - some might say its heart and soul - lies in the worldly wise and wickedly satirical script by Frederic Raphael. His characters are equally blessed with wit and faults - they all have a knack for delivering wonderful one-liners in moments of crisis. Example - When Bogarde parts from Christie for the last time, he tells her that he intends to write a book about his life. Christie says that she played the biggest part in his life. Bogarde raises an eyebrow and replies quietly: "Certainly the most melodramatic."

It is precisely this contrast between Christie's emotional rollercoaster and Bogarde's coolly calculated underplaying that provides most of the film's best moments. Although Laurence Harvey also makes a significant contribution. I have always felt that Harvey was a seriously under-rated actor and here he proves just how effective he could be. Christie may have been the romantic face of a changing Britain, but Harvey was the realistic symbol of how things really worked - of the British obsessions with class, self-interest and hypocrisy. It's hard to watch Darling now without thinking of Harvey's character as a sort of Tony Blair in the making. It says much for Dirk Bogarde that he gives the best performance while playing the least believable character. Stranger still that Gregory Peck was once considered for the part.

If I have gone on about the stars more than the direction or design or music or anything like that, it is because this is essentially a film about people. The plot is not so much about what happens to them but how these events affect and change them. The camerawork is occasionally flashy but never intrusive. Sometimes the film looks almost like a documentary, an illusion helped by a first-rate supporting cast. But, more than anything else, this is Julie Christie's film - she is as faultless as she is natural. She won an Oscar for playing Diana Scott. But Darling deserves more than awards - it deserves to be seen.