By 1970 Blake Edwards was in a creative crisis that would last until 1975 when he turned again to Inspector Closeau in "The Return of the Pink Panther". He was able to still make a couple of good films before he died (including one I am very fond of, "That's Life! "). His leading lady Julie Andrews and composer Henry Mancini would still have to wait until 1982 for "Victor/Victoria" to have a great success, and by then the superstar status of Rock Hudson (with a haircut too snobbish for his standardized screen persona) was non-existent. Shot in 1968 when students and workers were protesting everywhere around the globe (riots affected production, and it was moved from Paris to Brussels), the events unfortunately did not hint Edwards that the world was changing fast. By 1970, when it was released, nobody could care less for a spy comedy set during I World War, while the rubbing lips routine passing for kissing was not convincing in the days of "free love". Worse is that there was no chemistry between the two leading actors, and they were not even convincing: Andrews as a Mata-Hari type spy called Lili Schmidt, and Hudson as a don Juan and star pilot who fights Von Richtofen in the skies. Hudson even seems tired and bored, specially when he tells her that she is the most sensual and exciting woman he has ever met (with all respect to Miss Andrews, one cannot help but think of Gina Lollobrigida, Paula Prentiss, Claudia Cardinale, Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, Angie Dickinson, and other very attractive ladies who were paired with Hudson). It is a very sad affair because it seems everybody tried hard, but Edwards and his co-scriptwriter William Peter Blatty mixed too many elements, from slapstick to aerial battles and all kinds of film homages: Edward's own "The Pink Panther" (with two Clouseau's clones), Wise's "The Sound of Music" (an aerial shot of Andrews running through a field, a group of children chanting in the countryside... not even "Do-Re-Mi", but a forgettable song), or Donner's "What's New, Pussycat?" (the final sequence at the Château Chantel hotel), among others. As for Mancini, he tried the same strategy of another 1970 film he scored, Vittorio de Sica's "I girasoli", for which he overused his main theme: here Mancini took the beautiful song "Whistling Away the Dark" (which also sounds very good with French lyrics) as the leitmotiv, and it is insistently heard throughout, while the other songs he penned with Johnny Mercer are weak. Perhaps if all of them (Mancini, Mercer, Blatty and Edwards) had concocted a typical Edwardian sophisticated comedy, it would have worked. It did not, but at least eleven years later the whole mess inspired Edwards' very funny "S.O.B."
Review of Darling Lili
