TRIVIAL PURSUITS Disaster flicks
When Hello, Dolly!,
Paint Your Wagon and Sweet Charity were all released at the end of the 1960s, each lost money for the studios involved. The box-office climate was in flux, and musicals, even those with dark, complex themes, such as Bob Fosse’s Charity, were on their way out.
In 1970, Julie Andrews starred in the last of these doomed big-budget musical productions in Paramount’s Darling Lili. Blake Edwards, who had brought the hilarious
Pink Panther series to the big screen, produced, directed and co-wrote the film, set in London in World War I.
Edwards’ creation isn’t a traditional musical as much as a tune-filled rom-com constructed from a pastiche of spy tales, silent-filmera slapstick and time-tested melodrama.
Lili Smith (Andrews) poses as a British music hall singer whose patriotic performances inspire the troops, but who is actually working—Mata Hari-like—as a spy for the kaiser. She is ordered to gather military information from all-American air-squadron commander Major William Larrabee, played by Rock Hudson. Lili employs considerable skulduggery and cunning in a calculated seduction of the airman, but she loses her heart in the process, jeopardizing her assignment.
Viewers are treated to a mix of wartime ditties (“Mademoiselle from Armentieres”), rousing patriotic chestnuts (“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”) and new songs by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, including the Golden Globe winner “Whistling Away the Dark.”
At its release, Darling Lili was a box-office flop. But its uncommon script, talented cast and appealing music make it an overlooked gem that’s worth revisiting.
Upending her good-girl image, Andrews plays a sultry femme fatale with precise comic timing.