Trailer
Plot summary
During World War I, Lili Smith is a celebrated British music hall singer. She is also half German and works as a German spy. The British and French pilots she meets at the Cafe Can-Can admire her. Major William Larrabee, an American, woos her with a gypsy serenade and a night-time champagne picnic. She passes what she learns from him to Colonel Kurt Von Ruger, the German liaison who pretends to be her uncle. The French authorities come to suspect Larrabee and ask Lili to watch him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Darling Lili (1970)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Blake Edwards courted British comedian Benny Hill for the supporting role of Captain Duvalle in Darling Lili. Hill asked whether Edwards wanted an east side or west side Paris accent, and the director, unimpressed by his attention to detail, gave the part to Jacques Marin.
- Paramount executives interfered continually while Blake Edwards was making Darling Lili and eventually edited the film largely without his input. Edwards later satirized the experience in his 1981 film S.O.B., which Paramount also distributed theatrically.
- Blake Edwards wanted to film Darling Lili's aerial dogfight scenes in South Carolina, but the studio forced him to shoot them in Ireland using planes from The Blue Max, at a cost of $70,000 a day.
- For the aerial work, the studio had Slingsby Aircraft Ltd build six 7/8th scale SE 5 replicas, nicknamed the "Mini SE 5". The assembled aircraft flew thousands of hours, and pilots Charles Boddington and Derek Piggott performed many of the more spectacular stunts.
- Much of Darling Lili's planned Paris shooting had to be moved to Brussels, Belgium, because of the May 1968 protests in France.
- Darling Lili was the last full musical to have its song lyrics written by Johnny Mercer, who wrote them with composer Henry Mancini.
