The Girl in the Empty Dress – Julie Christie and Darling

HE: How do you feel?
SHE: Empty.

– Dirk Bogarde and Julie Christie, Darling

The iconic opening scene of Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) shows the serenely beautiful face of Julie Christie being plastered, on a billboard, over images of starving African children. We are led to believe this is the cover of a glossy magazine whose title is Ideal Woman. Irony, you see. Darling is one of those films that cannot make a point without overstating it. On the one hand, this image tells us that we live – as Lady Bracknell might say – “in an age of surfaces.”¹ A world where tawdry and superficial glamour is apt to eclipse the day-to-day reality of human suffering. On the other, it implies that the woman Christie plays – a rather vacuous Swinging London model named Diana Scott – is in some way responsible for the state of the world today, if not for the decline and fall of Western civilisation as we know it.

To get from one of these ideas to the other requires a leap of quasi-Olympic proportions. A leap that involves a hefty dose of moralising and misogyny. There is nothing the least bit novel about the plot of Darling. A girl from a modest background rises to dizzying heights of wealth, fame and glamour by dint of using and abusing (or, perhaps, being used by and abused by) a succession of men. But no sooner has she got to the top than she starts to find it all a bit empty. This is the story of virtually every melodramatic ‘women’s picture’ of the ’30s and Joan Crawford must have filmed it at least a dozen times in that decade alone. Jeanine Basinger sums up the appeal of this type of movie:

Women in the audience could watch while their favourite female stars wore great clothes, sat on great furniture, loved bad men, had lots of sex, told the world off for restricting them, destroyed their enemies, even gave their children away.²

In Darling, Christie’s character takes a step further by having an abortion and wearing a jaunty leopard-print cloche hat for the occasion. Otherwise, the formula has barely changed since the ’30s. The one essential difference lies in the character of the heroine herself. At no point is it implied that Joan Crawford in Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931) – or Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933) or Loretta Young in Midnight Mary (William Wellman, 1933) – is inherently rotten, soulless and corrupt. They are portrayed invariably as decent girls who make mistakes and then pay for them, albeit in ways that defy narrative credibility of any sort. It took a supposedly ‘modern’ movie like Darling to portray its heroine as a Thoroughly Bad Lot who embodies most (or perhaps all) of the rampant depravities of her day.

To this end, she seduces a married TV presenter (Dirk Bogarde) away from his wife and children. We never see enough of his home life to know what has gone wrong with his marriage or why he might want to walk out of it. Diana seems to wreck his family in the same way the Serpent in the Bible brings Original Sin into the Garden of Eden. A) Because it is there. B) Because she can. When he learns she has been catting around, he tells her: “Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at a time.” She responds by sweeping all his books off the shelves and throwing them on the floor. Next, she takes up with a slickly cynical advertising executive (Laurence Harvey). He takes her to Paris for a jet-set wedding that turns into a live sex show that turns into an orgy. With its stalking, predatory lesbians and its aura of portentous doom, this sequence is almost as inadvertently hilarious as the masked gangbang in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999). As Pauline Kael points out, “[the] vice is as homey as wife-swapping in the suburbs. Even the orgy can easily be staged on a modest budget in a small home or apartment.”³

Is it entirely an accident that both Darling and Eyes Wide Shut were scripted by the same writer, Frederic Raphael? Or that both of Diana’s paramours are played by gay (or bisexual) actors whose queerness was closeted at the time but seems quite blindingly obvious today? Is it because John Schlesinger was a known gay director that Diana “suggests an androgynous version of a male hustler”?⁴ Her most engaging and believable relationship is with her gay photographer pal (Roland Curram) – the one man she never abuses and who never abuses her. Together they go shoplifting in the food hall at Fortnum & Mason’s, accidentally poison the goldfish with gin martinis and spend a holiday on Capri, where they share the sexual services of the same hunky waiter. Their friendship is in no way transactional; it is just two people who, instinctively and unconditionally, have each other’s back. As Vito Russo states, “[their] chief concern, apparently, was to set the alarm clock to remind them to turn over in the Italian sun.”⁵

Our chief concern today is to separate the slick and amusing camp-fest we enjoy from the serious social and moral document that was no doubt intended. Few things date as badly as modernity and Darling is a classic case in point. Diana’s emotionally empty marriage to an Italian prince (José Luis de Vilallonga) is in no way convincing as a comeuppance. “Within five minutes of the film’s ending,” writes Alexander Walker, “she would have had the spare Ferrari on the road to Rome to have herself a little dolce vita.”⁶ The problem with Darling is not that Diana is never satisfyingly punished. It is the all-pervasive idea that she deserves to be. In a cornball melodrama of the ’30s, a woman was typically more sinned against than sinning. Fully three decades later, a ‘sophisticated’ film of the ’60s made her out to be a walking avatar of Sin itself. One hates to think that was ever called progress. 

Darling (1965 UK 128 mins)

Prod. Co: Joseph Janni Production, Vic Films Productions, Appia Films Prod: Joseph Janni Dir: John Schlesinger Scr: Frederic Raphael Phot: Kenneth Higgins Mus: John Dankworth Ed: Jim Clark Prod Des: Ray Simm

Cast: Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey, José Luis de Vilallonga, Roland Curram

Endnotes