Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)

Diana Scott: Julie Christie
Robert Gold: Dirk Bogarde
Miles Brand: Laurence Harvey
Prince Cesare della Romita: José Luis de Vilallonga
Malcolm: Roland Curram

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Frederic Raphael
Cinematography: Kenneth Higgins
Art direction: Ray Simm
Film editing: Jim Clark
Costume design: Julie Harris
Music: John Dankworth

When Darling was first released, the marriage of its protagonist, Diana Scott, to a minor European royal was taken to be a sly reference to the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. Today, it looks a lot more like a strikingly prophetic vision of the future awaiting Diana Spencer, then only 4 years old, who would find that marrying a prince entails not only a lot of unwelcome attention but also a good deal of boredom. Boredom is the keynote of Darling, as well as its undoing. There were filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais who could portray the existential ennui of the glamorous upper classes without boring their audiences as well, but John Schlesinger wasn't one of them. Julie Christie gives her considerable all as Diana Scott, a pretty young model whose lack of inner substance is her undoing, and she won an Oscar for her pains. But her performance isn't enough to save the film from tedium. As written by Frederic Raphael, who also won an Oscar, there's not enough to Diana to keep us interested in her fate. Instead, the filmmakers fall back on thudding irony, like Diana's being hyped as "The Happiness Girl" when we know that she's cruelly unhappy. The blame falls on the media exploiters, of course, the producers and journalists and ad-men who could hardly care less about the person they're exploiting. But they're an easy target, and for the blame to land we need to feel that there's more to Diana than meets the eye, that she's a victim of something more than her own aimlessness. Unfortunately, we never get a sense that there's unexplored potential to the character.

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top

Joe Lampton: Laurence Harvey
Alice Aisgill: Simone Signoret
Susan Brown: Heather Sears
Mr. Brown: Donald Wolfit
Charles Soames: Donald Houston
Elspeth: Hermione Baddeley
George Aisgill: Allan Cuthbertson
Mr. Hoylake: Raymond Huntley
Jack Wales: John Westbrook
Mrs. Brown: Ambrosine Phillpotts

Director: Jack Clayton
Screenplay: Neil Paterson
Based on a novel by John Braine
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Music: Mario Nascimbene

Laurence Harvey's narrow eyes and sharpish features (and a long brush cut that makes him look a little like Clint Eastwood) provide the right wolfish look for Joe Lampton, a young man from the provinces on the make. Heir to such classic challengers to the class system as Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, and Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths, Lampton is determined to break down the British barriers to upward movement. He arrives in the Yorkshire city of Warnley to take on a government job and walks right into a hormonal stew, the eager young men and women of his office casting eyes on one another, but especially on the newcomer. But Lampton knows what he wants when he sees her: a rich young woman named Susan Brown, whose father is a local factory owner. Learning that Susan is a member of an amateur theatrical group, Lampton joins up, only to find himself edged aside by the well-to-do Jack Wales, who is paying court to Susan. Every move Lampton makes to ingratiate himself with Susan, who is inclined to return his attentions, is thwarted by her parents, especially her formidably snobbish mother. We sense Mrs. Brown's backstory: She has married rich herself, to a working-class self-made man, and is determined to keep climbing higher -- no lower-class Lamptons allowed. Determined as he is to win Susan, whose parents send her away on an extended vacation on the Riviera,  Lampton comforts himself with another member of the theater company, Alice Aisgill, an older woman with a bullying, unfaithful husband. When Susan returns, Lampton resumes his pursuit of her, but finds that he has fallen in love with Alice, whose maturity offers something that makes Susan's girlishness seem cloying. When he manages to seduce Susan, he's bored and annoyed by her reaction to losing her virginity: She doesn't feel different, she simpers and keeps asking him if she looks different. But Susan gets pregnant, forcing the Browns into an accommodation with him: marriage and a lucrative job -- everything he wanted. The crisis with Alice this precipitates is predictable, but the film makes a sharp turn into melodrama before the ending. Room at the Top was a hit, winning Simone Signoret a best actress Oscar and Harvey a nomination (along with a nomination for Hermione Baddeley in the very small role of the friend who lends Alice her flat for the trysts with Lampton). It's a little slow in the middle section, as the affair with Alice progresses, and Harvey was an actor of limited range, so the shift from the predatory Lampton of the first part of the film to the man infatuated with Alice doesn't quite come off. But it's a perfect example of the Angry Young Men films, plays, and novels that revolutionized British culture in the austere postwar 1950s.

The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

Although Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) is by far the more celebrated film, I think as satire The Manchurian Candidate is a more subtle and sophisticated response to the Cold War. It may have fallen out of favor too soon because its subject, political assassination, became so sensitive just a month after its release, when John F. Kennedy was shot. For reasons that remain unclear, including Frank Sinatra's purchase of the distribution rights, it fell out of release for a long time, and only resurfaced occasionally on television until 1987, when, after a screening at the New York Film Festival, it became available on video. It's a loopy, scary, often hilarious, sometimes puzzling, and -- especially in any election year -- absolutely essential American film. Frankenheimer, who was one of the pioneers of American television drama in the age of shows like Playhouse 90, never developed a distinctive style in his movie work, but he knew how to tell a story, even when the story is as convoluted as this one. With George Axelrod, he adapted the 1959 thriller by Richard Condon, sometimes lifting dialogue direct from the novel. The results are occasionally enigmatic, as in the meeting of Marco (Sinatra) with Eugenie Rose Chaney (Janet Leigh) on the train, where the dialogue shifts into the surreal and seems to be laden with code. In terms of plot, the encounter -- probably the oddest meeting on a train since Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint's characters met in North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) -- goes nowhere: Leigh's character serves no further discernible role in the narrative. But it serves nicely to keep the viewer off guard as things grow increasingly bizarre. The weakest performance in the film is probably that of Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw. Harvey can't seem to be bothered to keep up an American accent, but somehow even that fits the ambiguity of his character. Angela Lansbury, as Raymond's mother (this is the point where it's usual to mention that she was only three years older than Harvey), is absolutely terrifying as one of the movies' greatest female villains. It earned her an Oscar nomination, but she lost to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn). James Gregory, as her Joe McCarthy-like husband, would not be out of place in the current presidential campaign.