Schlesinger isn\u2019t subtle about the point he\u2019s trying to make. Right from the opening credits \u2013 featuring a poster hanger pasting a splashy ad of Diana\u2019s face over a P.S.A. about famine relief \u2013 he wants us to pay as much attention to what\u2019s going on beneath the glossy surfaces as the beauty of the images themselves. Ostensibly, Diana\u2019s voice-over unspools as an interview she\u2019s giving to a reporter for Ideal Woman<\/em> magazine. But it doesn\u2019t take an eagle-eyed viewer to notice how often the manner in which she describes her thoughts and feelings is at odds with what\u2019s happening onscreen. Everything is a commodity to be polished and sold in this world, including your own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film is split into essentially three acts, all of which are concerned with distinct arcs in Diana\u2019s career. We first meet her as a fresh-faced twenty-year-old new arrival in the city who\u2019s plucked out of a crowd for a woman on the street interview. She\u2019s immediately taken with her interlocutor Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), who exudes an intelligence and sophistication that feels seductively modern to her, as the pair banter about the true meaning of conventionality. Nevermind that both of them are married to other people; an affair becomes inevitable, setting up a pattern for Diana that will repeat itself throughout the remainder of the runtime. Soon enough they\u2019ve both left their spouses and moved in together, at which point Diana begins looking for something, and someone, else to occupy her time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the script\u2019s conception of Diana, she\u2019s a woman whose most salient quality is how easily bored she gets. She must always move forward, shark-like, or risk curdling into cruelty towards those she loves. Not content with the stable but stultifying life that Robert provides, she finds herself entangled with dilettante advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), who has access to the high society she craves. He\u2019s also bisexual, and introduces her to the queer circles of Paris. Though he wasn\u2019t out at the time he made Darling<\/em>, Schlesinger himself was gay, and would explore these subjects in further depth in later work like Midnight Cowboy<\/em> and Sunday, Bloody Sunday<\/em>. Here, though, it feels like one more milieu that Diana tries on, then carelessly discards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s in this middle section that Schlesinger\u2019s critique of the era\u2019s mod culture crystallizes. While television wasn\u2019t exactly new at the time, its utility as a manipulative tool was rapidly increasing. In scene after scene on film sets and in advertising board rooms, Schlesinger and screenwriter Frederic Raphael hone in on the medium\u2019s uniquely insidious appeal: that the people who manufacture its unattainable images are just as susceptible to its false promises as the general public. \u201cDo you buy her?\u201d Miles asks a fellow executive of a picture of Diana. But his answer would flatter rather than horrify her, particularly as the glimpses she catches of her own face in the mirror grow increasingly unbearable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a tightrope role and Christie, who always seemed to be appreciated more for her beauty than her considerable acting ability, walks it brilliantly. Diana is a vain and shallow person, and some critics at the time unfairly dinged her performance by attributing those same qualities to Christie herself. What those complaints miss is how tricky making a character like that interesting to audiences can be. It\u2019s the sort of thing that makes or breaks a picture, but Christie\u2019s irrepressible charm shines through even in Diana\u2019s most loathsome moments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the final act, she\u2019s grown weary of the transactional nature of her life in London and fled to Capri. She meets a widowed Italian prince and while she\u2019s initially resistant to his marriage proposal, she eventually accepts and finds herself crowned Princess Diana (an eerily prescient coincidence, given that it was still roughly fifteen years before Lady Spencer \u2013 a woman whose own predatory relationship with the press would end in tragedy \u2013 ascended to the British throne.) Newsreel footage shows a smiling Diana caring for her seven adopted children and participating in charity work. Privately, she remains as miserable as ever, and surely will long after the film ends. She might have the coveted spot on the front of the magazine, but we know there\u2019s nothing but blank pages underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/darling2-1024x667.jpg\")
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