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All Blake Edwards did was recycle material


In seeing this movie for the first time today, it confirmed something that always irritated me about Edwards. Not only was he very hit and miss, he often recycled material throughout his directing career--the same gags, concepts, etc. Because of that, certain movies that you initially liked start to lose their charm once you notice how recycled they are.

When you get down to it, Darling Lili is basically another Victor/Victoria. Yes, I know that the story is different, but the structure and tone is the same. It's Julie Andrews playing a singer from a vintage era falling in love with a man under very unusual circumstances. There are many musical numbers of her performing in a nightclub in cosmopolitan Europe interspersed with "gag" scenes involving secondary characters. Don't get me wrong. I love Victor/Victoria, but it's kind of shocking to me how much Edwards got away with recycling his movies over and over again.

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DARLING LILI (an original story freely adapted from the legend of Mata Hari) and VICTOR/VICTORIA (which was adapted from a German film from the early 1930s) bear only the most superficial resemblances. They are entirely different in tone, theme and production. As for the director's personal style of filmmaking, that's a matter of taste and opinion. One could argue that Hitchcock, Spielberg and Scorsese have the same limitations or penchant for repeating themselves; I don't happen to agree, but I do think they each had/have their own unique style of story-telling and they bring that esthetic to every film they made.

Very, very few film directors who are successful over a period of decades somehow display a virtuosic capacity to not appear to repeat themselves: I cite William Wyler, Robert Wise and David Lean as among the few whose total screen output is astonishing in its variety, nuance, and richness of character and setting.


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