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Thanks for the memories!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

For a change, Rock Hudson does not dominate a picture.Yes, it's hard to imagine that Julie Andrews is a German World War 1 spy in this wonderful film, especially since she sings so beautifully here. From the opening number of Whistling in the Dark, which was Oscar nominated, for best song, we know we're in for a treat in this film.The film is a special one because circumstances dictate that Lily and her uncle come around by picture's end. It also again shows that her love for the man (Hudson) she is spying on shall eventually circumvent politics, even in war-time.The patriotic songs are wonderfully delivered and you sure get a feel of the period. There were certain times that I felt that Andrews was Mary Poppins or the novice Maria of "The Sound of Music."

Regardless of which of the three extant versions one sees, there are simple facts about all of the Blake & Julie movies one can only ignore if one is locked in a time warp. Let's face it, Julie was a =terrific= technical vocalist of the archaic "bel canto" style. As well as an actress of the suspension-of-observation and buying-of- belief mode that was popular when bel canto singing was popular. If one likes Gilbert & Sullivan, Julie is truly one's cup of tea. However, if one expects to see something other than Andrews's standard, patently demure ingénue projection of feminine behavior, this will no more be the place than anything else she and Blake ever put together. Had the film laid on more of the pretty decent -- if at times fantastical -- aerial combat scenes and far less of the numbing melodrama, it might have almost been in a class with "The Blue Max" of more or less the same vintage. (The reliably Teutonic Jeremy Kemp, provided much of the character intrigue -- such as it was -- in both films.) One has to have a particular taste and value set to enjoy Blake & Julie movies. This is no different.

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."

Blake Edwards' legendary fiasco, begins to seem pointless after just 10 minutes. A combination of The Eagle Has Landed, Star!, Oh! What a Lovely War!, and Edwards' Pink Panther films, Darling Lili never engages the viewer; the aerial sequences, the musical numbers, the romance, the comedy, and the espionage are all ho hum. At what point is the viewer supposed to give a damn? This disaster wavers in tone, never decides what it wants to be, and apparently thinks it's a spoof, but it's pathetically and grindingly square. Old fashioned in the worst sense, audiences understandably stayed away in droves. It's awful. James Garner would have been a vast improvement over Hudson who is just cardboard, and he doesn't connect with Andrews and vice versa. And both Andrews and Hudson don't seem to have been let in on the joke and perform with a miscalculated earnestness. Blake Edwards' SOB, apparently inspired by Edwards' experience with Darling Lili, isn't much more than OK, but it's the only good that ever came out of Darling Lili. The expensive and professional look of much of Darling Lili, only make what it's all lavished on even more difficult to bear. To quote Paramount chief Robert Evans, "24 million dollars worth of film and no picture".