The eighth showdown in Battle of the Blondes, between British actresses Julie Christie and Diana Dors, was a nice lesson on how to make the most of a small role in a film... and how not to. In both cases, neither actress has the lead role in her respective film (Billy Liar for Christie and An Alligator Named Daisy for Dors), but whereas Dors -- who actually had the larger role, comparatively speaking -- took her part and turned in an adequate but thoroughly unmemorable performance, Christie manages to take her roughly ten minutes in Billy Liar and almost steal the picture from lead actor Tom Courtenay. This may seem unsurprising, considering Christie is thought of as a bona fide "actress" who still wins accolades for her performances today, while Dors is often lumped in with other fifties' sexpots, but remember that fellow sexpot Jayne Mansfield turns in an extremely memorable performance in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, as does Marilyn Monroe in any number of her films. The issue at hand here is not Christie's and Dors' overall careers but the way they handled their roles in two specific films.
What helps highlight Christie's and Dors' performances is that both Billy Liar and An Alligator Named Daisy are okay, but not great, films; in other words, their ability to make a mark on the minds of the viewer rests entirely on their own shoulders, and not on the shoulders of a particularly skilled writer or director. Billy and Daisy are quite different in their own rights, the former an example of Britain's late-fifties/early-sixties "Kitchen Sink Realism" (which turned its eye on the hum-drum lives of the post-war British middle class, searching for the pain and melodrama hidden underneath), the latter a light, silly comedy that decides at odd intervals it's also going to be a musical, and Billy is certainly the "better" film overall, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's more entertaining to watch or even a better vehicle for its respective stars. The problem with Billy Liar, which tells the story of a young funeral clerk who invents elaborate fantasies in his head to compensate for the tedium of his everyday life, is that for all it gets right, including the nuances of working-class ennui and the tragic combination of family responsibility versus personal ambition, in the end it doesn't have anything very captivating to say about Billy's story that we couldn't have surmised without watching the film; in fact, the only truly captivating thing about Billy Liar, period, is Christie's performance. Tom Courtenay, as Billy, does a wonderful job, but what Christie does in her scant ten minutes on screen is create a complete picture of a girl who not only represents Billy's romantic ideal but also lives her life in the way he wishes he could live his. What's more, much of this characterization comes from her, not from the words she speaks or the artful way the director films her. Her character Liz is a jolt of energy in Billy's bleak world, just as she provides a jolt to the film itself.
An Alligator Named Daisy, meanwhile, is better than it ought to be, considering the premise -- a man happens into the possession of a pet alligator, which disrupts his romance with one woman (Dors) while bringing him closer to a female zookeeper (Jeannie Carson) -- but it's still not very good, and as I already mentioned, twice decides it's going to be a musical without showing any inclination toward that genre throughout the rest of the film. Carson, not Dors, is actually the female lead, and her ability to sing is likely the only reason for the film's two musical numbers, but Dors' character Vanessa becomes more important in the second half of the film, which is unfortunately where Daisy really starts to go off the rails and shift from being amusingly silly to ridiculous. Dors is given little to do in a part intended to emphasize her appearance over her acting (she has one extended sequence in a bubble bath), but the fact that she chooses to do even less with the part than she might have is what makes her performance truly disappointing. She's not bad; she's just not memorable, or really anything other than blond -- which might seem like enough in a contest entitled "Battle of the Blondes," but is far from it when her competition is Julie Christie.
Billy Liar: B
An Alligator Named Daisy: B-
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