Review of "Darling Lili"

Quite a bad film, but sort of enjoyable nonetheless. It's a WW1 spy film, with Julie Andrews as a singer entertaining the British and French troops behind the lines and in the field hospitals, but also being a German spy. I want to say that I can't remember a film in which Julie Andrews plays a villain, but there isn't really any sense that she is a baddie in this...she is in a relationship with top flyer Major Larrabee and trying to wheedle secrets out of him to pass (over the phone, implausibly) to her German handler, but there isn't really any sense that this is villainous or that it puts soldiers' lives in jeopardy. 

Much of the time it has the feeling of a Carry On film, particularly with the two comic French army intelligence characters, who spend much of their time falling off roofs and into ponds. In fact almost all of the French characters are played for laughs, though the Germans are to be taken seriously - some of them are sinister, some are quite likeable, especially the handler, played by Jeremy Kemp. 

The plot is mainly terrible, the acting pretty awful, but I am a bit of a Julie Andrews fan, and the songs and singing scenes are enjoyable. Afterwards I read the Wikipedia article, and saw that this had a huge budget - and you can see where it went, with really big crowd scenes and some quite good dogfight footage - but made very little money, though it won one award (for a Henry Mancini song) and was nominated for others. Perhaps they should have spent some of the huge budget on the writers, though I know that's not very Hollywood.

Unusually watched as hard disc recording at my mother-in-law.