Charlie Is My Darling Review, Films and Filming, 1966

Peter Whitehead's Wholly Communion (Britain) about the Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall last year, reviewed in June, won two main awards. Whitehead also has his Charlie Is My Darling at the festival, an hour-long documentary about the Rolling Stones which cinematically was one of the best films shown, though the audience seemed to have some difficulty in understanding some of the interviews. Unlike the Maysles brothers' film on the Beatles, it attempts and succeeds in going much deeper into the individuals concerned, and brings out a pathetic sadness about the teenage idolatry about pop singers, and the effect it has on the Stones who emerge from the film as basically very talented musicians who would be completely destroyed once they lost their own individual personalities. In a film like this it would be simple to settle for the easy amusing way of editing in as much riot material as possible, and of photographing Mick Jagger's antics on stage, but Whitehead has chosen to examine as closely as possible the Stones as individuals talking about themselves and their ideas on life (one emerges as being very intelligent, and curiously very much of an idealist). Josef von Sternberg, who attended most of the press conferences, but only spoke twice about other people's films, announced that he considered it "a very beautiful film; it is, and will remain, a very valuable social document."

Films and Filming

December 1966