Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Fatma Suarez
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Dana
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
jjnxn-1
Colorful musical that is deficient in the script department, exactly why Julie is a spy is never really apparent and it really hurts the film. That being said the production design is beautiful as are some of Julie's costumes, it all seems overproduced and under-directed though. While the design is good a problem the film suffers from, and it was one many 60's musicals share, is that nothing looks lived in or used so it feels false from the beginning. Rock has been better elsewhere although that also is probably the fault of the script. What makes this worth sitting through is Julie and her voice which is exquisite and put to use on some lovely songs. "Whistling Away the Dark" in particular is haunting and beautifully staged if only the rest of the film was up to its brilliance this would have been something indeed.
davidjudeallen
I found this at a DVD sale and I'd never heard of this movie before. The description on the DVD case sounded fun and pacey - what a fallacy! After a very arresting opening scene, the movie devolves into the most wet and infantile romance story with no rhyme or reason to its plot and more montage sequences than you can poke a stick at. Neither Andrews or Hudson have more than a dozen lines in the first hour and when they finally do get any dialogue of significance you're past the point where you care to hear it. Andrews' songs are all identical (with the exception of an inexplicable strip sequence towards the middle) and while she is, as usual, vocally flawless, she is completely disconnected to her material and her co-stars. Hudson has no capacity opposite her to appear the powerful leading man he had in past movies. A minor amount of comic relief is offered with some stock Blake Edwards material - two bumbling French inspectors and a drunken flight captain. Beyond that this movie is badly put together, horrendously developed, badly scored (the same endlessly sappy violin riff throughout) and poorly costumed with little attention to detail or to period. Andrews looks sterile throughout, firing up a few times for some fight scenes that fall flat for the simple reason that they, like every other plot point in this movie, are given little to no background. The aerial dog-fighting sequences are very grandly shot but have no stakes whatsoever rendering them a pointless distraction. Edwards later claimed the studio interfered a great deal with this movie in development - honestly I don't buy it. This plot was rotten to the core. Having seen the full 133 minute cut I can well understand why a lot of editing went on. ANYTHING to make this dog have some pace or punch!
PudgyPandaMan
I'm not a big fan of musicals, although this technically might not qualify as a musical. But I thought I would give it a chance as I love war movies. It was mediocre at best.Hudson seems totally out of kilter in this role. It just didn't work for me. Julie Andrews probably played her part as best as she could, but I just find it hard to buy her as a conniving, deceptive spy. Sorry, I know that is classic stereotyping on my part. But I have to say I think this is Julie at her most beautiful and feminine looking. I always thought of her as more matronly, but then surely that's a result of her roles in Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. No doubt they were desperately trying to get her out of that typecasting in this role. She was quite beguiling in appearance here, but I still didn't buy her as a spy.I couldn't keep my focus through the whole movie and found myself tuning in and out - and having conversations with those in my room (which I usually never do - I'm always shushing everybody). So that tells you how little it held my attention. Don't waste your time!
Maciste_Brother
Years ago, when DARLING LILI played on TV, it was always the pan and scan version, which I hated and decided to wait and see the film in its proper widescreen format. So when I saw an inexpensive DVD of this Julie Andrews/Blake Edwards opus, I decided to purchase and watch it once and for all.Boy, what a terrible film. It's so bad and on so many levels that I really do not know where to start in describing where and when it goes so horribly wrong. Looking at it now, it's obvious to any fans of movies that Blake Edwards created this star vehicle for his wife simply because so many other directors had struck gold with Andrews in musicals (MARY POPPINS, SOUND OF MUSIC, THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, etc) but also because Andrews was snubbed from starring in projects made famous on stage by Julie herself (CAMELOT, MY FAIR LADY, etc) because Hollywood thought she wasn't sexy or glamorous enough. So Blake created this stillborn effort, to showcase his wife in a bizarre concoction of spy story/war movie/romance/slapstick comedy/musical. DARLING LILI suffers from multiple personalities, never knowing who or what it is. Some specific scenes are good or effective but as a whole, it just doesn't work at all to a point of it being very embarrassing.Mind you, the version on the DVD is the "director's cut", or in this case, "let's salvage whatever we can" from this notorious box office flop. In releasing the DVD, Edwards cut 19 scenes (19!!!!!!!!) from the original bloated theatrical version into this more streamlined and yet remarkably ineffective version. The film moves along with no idea of what it is. We are 25 minutes into it and we still don't know what's going on or why we're watching what's going. What kind of spy is Lili? How powerful is she? Was she ever responsible for someone's death? Instead we watch a thoroughly bored looking Rock Hudson trying to woo a thoroughly bored looking Julie Andrews. Things aren't helped much with the inexplicable reason why the two fall in love. Why does Julie fall for Hudson? Why him and not other men she got involved with? There should have been one of her ex hanging around, trying to win her back or trying to decipher her secret. This would have given us some much needed contrast to the muddled action. It would also have given us some impetuous to the sluggish proceedings. There's no catalyst in this story.One only has to look at the cut scenes to clearly see that Edwards and the writer just came up with ideas inspired by Andrews' (and Edwards') previous successes. The best (or worst) example is the scene when Andrews and Hudson follow a group of children who sing in the middle of a forest. Edwards channeling SOUND OF MUSIC. It's no wonder he removed it from the DVD. Back in 1970, that scene might have worked on a certain level but today, that moment reeks of desperation. There are other plot elements directly inspired by Andrews/Edwards other films. The endless scenes of dogfights is inspired by the much better MODERN MILLIE. The musical moment "I'll give you three guesses" was created just to make fun of Julie's MARY POPPINS persona, which is turned "raunchy" with Julie doing a striptease in the act. The ending, bird's eye view of Julie running towards Hudson's plane, is another "wink" at SOUND OF MUSIC.The whole thing is confusing. Julie plays a singer, born from a German father and British mother, who lives in England but sings her (English) songs in Paris. You never know exactly where the story takes place. Some moments are just badly edited. Like when Julie and her "uncle" are on horseback. They talk and talk and then Julie suddenly sprints off in mid-sentence. I'm like "what happened here?"The comedy bits are unfunny and cringe-worthy. Every scene with the French police are pathetic. Where's Peter Sellers when you really need him. The action is badly thought-up. When Julie and her "uncle" are on their way to Germany on that train, Hudson's squadron and the German squadron reach the train (in daytime) at the same time even thought the train has been moving for hours and they left the night before. The French/German border is not that far. Anyway, that's one slow moving train there. The 'climax' is an entirely poorly executed moment.The musical moments. The beginning is the best part of the entire film (and the reason I gave this film 3 stars) but its effect is diminished considerably because it's repeated at the end. Speaking of redundant, did we really need to see a can-can dance, Crepe Suzette stripping scene and Julie stripping too? The "Girl in no man's land" is OK even if it's bleeding obvious, but that moment just doesn't make any sense whatsoever because Lili sings it to a group of injured soldiers at a French hospital, making me wonder: how many soldiers there were injured indirectly by the result of her spying?The whole project is listless and without energy. The romance is 100% unbelievable. Rock Hudson is way too old and tired looking (check out the museum scene). Julie looks dazed, like she's on Valium. But what really kills this ill-conceived project is Julie playing a German spy. Edwards desperately wanted to dispel the Mary Poppins syndrome afflicting his wife and believed that playing a traitor was a good career decision. As much as I like Julie, she's no Greta Garbo, who pulled it off so beautifully in MATA HARI. Funny enough, even if Julie plays a German spy, she still comes across as cloying and cute.How bad is DARLING LILI? Even after 37 years since its release, Blake Edwards felt he still needed to work on it for its DVD release.
