While enduring an awful night of shivers then insomnia, I found a movie channel and let it run. In the middle of the night I ended up watching film DARLING LILI for the first time. It is set in the final year of an incredibly sanitized version of The Great War. Andrews plays a famous singer who is actually a patrician version of Mata Hari. She does not seem to do much in the way of actual espionage. Mostly she just passes along to her uncle (Jeremy Crabbe) stray bits of gossip from officers she entertains in her sumptuous mansion. One of them is Rock Hudson. They have zero charisma together and he looks like he just walked thru the part. Heck, he does not even appear into the film for quite a while. The film must have cost a fortune, even for big budget musicals of the time. Several times we see Lili performing to a packed opera house. That's a helluva lot of extras in period costumes. Throw in a Hallmark Channel version of THE BLUE MAX. Gotta give Hudson something to do. Julie Andrews' voice was at the top of her game. Honestly she and Blake would have been better served just doing a concert film. One thing to note is that Andrews and her husband/director Blake Edwards were chaffing at Andrew's usual screen persona, a mix of Mary Poppins, Maria von Trapp, and Emily. In all but one of her performances Lili wears incredible gowns. But when she learns her lover (Hudson) has been seeing a stripper, Lili decides to do a striptease number. Oh, and the film earned some salacious publicity at the time because Andrews did a topless scene. Nothing was visible on US screens of course. But there was always "the European version." Did I mention she and Hudson had zero charisma together? The film was Ms Andrew's first bomb, although not as bad as her next project STAR.
Review of Darling Lili
