Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling and Four in the Morning

Abstract

One year before Time magazine printed their now iconic article on ‘Swinging London’, two films were released that, though very different, are both expressions of a cultural space emerging from London in the preceding months and years. Darling and Four in the Morning were both released in 1965. One follows the fortunes of Diana Scott, a swinging subject in a frivolous and superficial London; the other weaves together the narratives of Wife, Girl and the corpse of a dead woman pulled from the Thames. In Darling, London is swinging. In Four in the Morning, if London swings then it does so elsewhere and always for somebody else. As this chapter demonstrates, by looking at how these women move through their filmic spaces, we can understand that central to both these films is their protagonists’ desire to have more. Each of these characters wants to broaden their experience of what it means to be a woman in 1960s Britain, and in all cases society refuses to comply. In these films, London is a site upon which their desire is fuelled and frustrated by the real—and the culturally mythologised—elements of mid-1960s social and cultural change.