User reviews

I stumbled across this film on late-night French TV last night, having missed the opening credits, but I was immediately struck by the sophistication of the production. Within a few minutes I was convinced that it had to be a Friz Lang film that I'd never heard of, but it wasn't until I checked IMDb this morning that I was able to confirm that suspicion. I had no idea that the final section of the film, with the trains of the afterlife, was coming, and I was, as the Brits say, gob-smacked. Corny and theatrical, sure, but also strange, beautiful, well-acted, and filmed with an eye that was a generation ahead of its time.

Ferenc Molnar according to David Ewen's book on Richard Rodgers turned down Giacomo Puccini to do an opera on Liliom. He said that he would rather Liliom be remembered as a Molnar play than a Puccini opera. Sad to say that if remembered it's remembered as the source of the Rodgers&Hammerstein musical Carousel. Watching Liliom now is like watching George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, you just drop in the songs where they go. A bit more difficult for Liliom as the locale was changed to coastal Maine from Budapest. Still it can be done.

Charles Boyer, soon to take up permanent residence in Hollywood and Madeline Ozeray are perfectly cast Liliom and Julie. The character of Liliom seems perfect for Fritz Lang's dismal view of the world. Liliom would like to do better for himself, but he seems condemned to barking for a carousel ride and providing the female owner a lift now and then. Seeing Julie who is not quite as innocent as she is in Carousel is him reaching for a last chance at happiness.

One hopes there is a heaven where one might get a chance to do something that might merit decent digs there. I did like the surreal black and white images of traveling to and arriving in heaven that Lang employed.

Joseph Schildkraut did an acclaimed Liliom on Broadway and there is an earlier American talkie version of Liliom starring Charles Farrell. Drop songs in if you must, but this Liliom is a classic unto itself.

Having tried and failed to sit through Carousel (a lumbering musical remake of the same story) I was wholly unprepared for the delight that is Liliom. A fantasy love story set half on Earth, half in Heaven, it's not at all the type of film you expect from Fritz Lang. It's closer in tone to Michael Powell or Jean Cocteau - and may be a 'hidden influence' on both A Matter of Life and Death and Orphee.

Not least among his achievements...Lang pulls off the well-nigh impossible feat of making Charles Boyer interesting! Sorry, but I'd always found this actor deeply resistible. A suburban housewife's stereotype of a suave Continental lover. But in this movie, Boyer plays a role that (even five years later) would have been reserved exclusively for Jean Gabin. A tough carnival barker and petty crook. A sexy 'bad boy' in a striped, clinging T-shirt and skin-tight jeans.

Boyer as Liliom is a Gallic cousin of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. I could well understand why Julie (Madeleine Ozeray) fell head over heels for him, because I did too. He treats her appallingly, of course. Boozing, whoring, gambling...even a (very non-PC) touch of wife-beating. For all its fantasy elements, this love story is as warped and sadomasochistic as any in later Lang movies, like Secret Beyond the Door or The Big Heat. (Hot coffee, anyone?)

Eventually, two angels show up and haul Boyer off to the hereafter - where he must atone for his sins! The term 'angels' is one I use loosely. Dark-suited, pale-skinned and shaven-headed, these two guys look like denizens of an X-rated Berlin nightclub. Kinkier still is Boyer's personal 'spirit guide' - a mad-eyed knife-grinder played by Antonin Artaud, the twisted genius who invented the Theatre of Cruelty.

Liliom is a rare treat for old-movie buffs. Lyrical and fantastic, yes. Soppy and sentimental, never. It stands comparison with Lang's best work from Berlin or Hollywood. I can only regret he did not spend more time in France.

Liliom Zadowski (Charles Boyer) is a charismatic ne'er-do-well working as a carousel barker at a small carnival when he seduces naïve young Julie (Madeleine Ozeray). Fired by his jealous boss (Florelle), he ends up loafing around the house and hanging out with his disreputable friends while Julie works. The seemingly one-sided relationship suffers until Julie (with great delicacy) tells him that she's pregnant. Excited by the prospect of fatherhood but desperate for money, Liliom partners with his scurrilous buddy Alfred (Pierre Alcover) to steal a payroll. The heist goes bad and Liliom ends up in heaven, where he is forced to face the truth about his behaviour towards Julie but is then given one day back on Earth to make amends. The film is a bit stagey (not surprising considering its source, a play by Ferenc Molnár) and leisurely paced (especially the first half), but the imaginative and surreal scenes in heaven are worth the wait. Apparently church dignitaries were not too pleased with the whimsical portrayal of God's dominion (complete with inept celestial bureaucrats sporting tiny wings and a big door leading to flaming purgatory). Boyer is excellent in the role (although his character is not very likable, especially by modern standards), which is good because he is the center of most scenes. Although not a success for director Fritz Lang, Liliom is an entertaining (albeit a bit talky and dated) early entry in the 'back from heaven' genre that is quite 'European' and more 'adult' than would have been allowed in post-Code Hollywood. In addition to this and other film versions, the Molnár's play is the basis of the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel".

"Liliom" is the only film Fritz Lang made in France, after he fled Nazi Germany and before moving to the States, and he brings all his skill and heart and humor to the wonderful Ferenc Molnar story. It must be seen-- a review of it can only give pale glimpses, such as these two lovely moments, one cinematic, one almost poetic:

First, a lap dissolve to indicate, as that technique so often does, the passage of time. It begins with the principals' names carved in wood "Julie Liliom"-- then that dissolves to new names carved over those "Andre et Daniele"-- and that in turn dissolves to "Mado Jean." Lovers fading into the background as time passes. Foreshadowing doesn't get sweeter or sadder than that.

Second, when Liliom is asked his surname, he replies, "Zadowski, like my mother." It is the only indication that he is illegitimate, and that sad fact is all the more poignant for being so understated.

As I watched I kept wondering what latter-day feminists might think of this film, because Liliom slaps Julie often enough to be accused of wife-beating. But of Liliom's character, Julie says, "Bad boy. Brute. Darling." She loves him, and knows he would never really harm her. The final moments of the film deliver its message-- love people for who they are, for better or worse, you won't change their character, and even brutes have hearts and can be worthy of love.

But I save my final remark for Charles Boyer. I've always enjoyed his work, but I was not prepared for a performance of this skill and range. He is alternately charming or savage, cocky or rueful. And he gives a gorgeously physical performance-- in a class with Toshiro Mifune as Sanjuro, or Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. He is always in motion, and when he sits with Julie on a park bench for the first time, seducing her, brushing her breasts with his hands, he seduces the whole audience. Well, me anyway.

Billy Wilder, Kurt Weill & Fritz Lang, three Berliners fleeing the Nazis, all sojourned in Paris before coming to the USA. Wilder's Parisian work was negligible, but the more established Weill & Lang each produced a masterpiece. While Weill's 7 DEADLY SINS is one of his best known classical works, Lang's adaptation of Molnar's great play is almost unknown. CAROUSEL, Rogers & Hammerstein musicalization of LILIOM, which all but buried the original, has now brought it back. (It shows up as a welcome 'extra' on the latest 2-DVD edition of CAROUSEL.) The musical stays remarkably close to LILIOM's plot, structure & characterizations, but Molnar is both rawer & more fanciful. The mix fits Lang like a monocle. As Liliom, the carousel barker (Billy Bigelow in the musical), Charles Boyer is just about perfect, bluntly cruel & irresistible, not only a precursor to the Stanley Kowalskis of the world, but like Brando with the sensual features of a Caravaggio. The rest of the cast is just as fine, but the film's success comes largely from Lang's handling of the difficult material. Rudolphe Mate's lensing looks stunning in this well preserved copy (far superior to the KINO DVD release) and the few scenes that suffer from flat poverty row French studio conditions are easily ignored. A near great film.

Director Fritz Lang draws us in immediately with a beautiful opening credit sequence which segues to a boisterous Charles Boyer in the role of Liliom, a carousel barker at a carnival. Liliom flirts with the ladies and plays to the crowd, and we find ourselves charmed. It wears off as he begins putting the moves on a beguiled young woman (Madeleine Ozeray), because it turns out he's quite a rake. He begins living off her and abusing her besides, in one scene slapping her, and in others alluding to beating her. I won't say more about the plot, except to say it takes a very interesting turn when he reluctantly agrees to commit a crime with his low-life buddy (Pierre Alcover).

Lang is very creative in this film, keeping us offbase as to where the film is going and capturing nice shots with reflections and shadows. At one point Boyer is mired in bureaucracy waiting for a form to be stamped, which is a comical moment. I had the film scored a little higher, but it dropped a little for me in just how light it got as it played out. The film was set up for much more interesting moments, and it seemed like a blown opportunity when it got silly. I was also not a fan of one of the film's messages, that out of love in a relationship "someone can beat you, and beat you, without hurting you at all." Watch this one for the unique role Boyer plays (apparently one of the actor's favorites), and to see Fritz Lang's only French film, made shortly after he left Germany.

The film writer Daniel Shaw, in his Senses of Cinema essay on Fritz Lang, dismisses the director's take on the Ferenc Molnar play Liliom as "a piece of fluff". He should have done a bit more research, because Lang himself described Liliom as one of his favourite of his own pictures. This is a fact that, of all people, an auteurist like Shaw should not be ignoring.

You can see why the confusion arises. Liliom is very much a product of its time and place. Made in France in the early 30s, it has the same blend of down-to-earth realism and dreamy sentimentality that characterises the early films of Rene Clair or Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. And this is surely why many commentators on Lang, most famous for his paranoiac thrillers, find it so hard to accept as part of the director's canon. But Lang, while he may have inflexible in style, was by no means limited in genre.

What connects all of Lang's pictures is the extravagant oddity with which they are shot. Metropolis is a baroque sci-fi, Scarlet Street is a baroque film noir, and Liliom is a baroque romance. The picture has the same intense and often musical rhythm of Lang's late silent pictures. As usual, he places us somewhat forcefully within the action at key moments, such as the opening scene where the two lovers meet, where the camera accompanies them on the carousel. We are made to feel Julie's strife through numerous point-of-view shots of Charles Boyer, or ones of a plaintive Madeleine Ozeray looking straight into the lens. The heaven and hell sequences are pure Lang fantastical indulgence, a far cry from the minimalist equivalents in the musical adaptation Carousel.

But to the consternation of the auteurists, who would maybe have Lang turn Molnar's classic into a grim fable of doom and destiny, Lang makes it abundantly clear that he can "do" romance, and do it with sincerity. In fact, viewing the director's work as a whole this is not entirely surprising – Spione, You and Me, The Big Heat and many more are incredibly tender at times. Here he gives weight to the relationship between Liliom and Julie from the way he shoots its beginning. We see Charles Boyer doing his exuberant barking act, always in mid-shot, often partly obscured by foreground business. When he lays eyes upon Ozeray, he suddenly comes into close-up. We thus connect with the character at the same time he connects with his beloved-to-be. Their first moments together are shot with typical Lang quirkiness – low angles and rapid edits. However, as the romance blossoms their moments together are allowed to play out in long takes and single camera set-ups.

Which brings me onto my next point. There is one way in which Liliom differs markedly from the average Fritz Lang picture. Normally the actors under Lang's jurisdiction were excessively hammy, all wild gestures and crazy faces, even in the lead roles. In Liliom however the keynote is one of restraint and credibility. We have a young Charles Boyer displaying all the charismatic charm that would propel him to Hollywood stardom a few years later. Sure, he is highly expressive, but in a way that is believable for that character. Madeleine Ozeray makes an incredibly fragile figure, playing out her emotions through tiny, soft movements. It's a pity she didn't share Boyer's later success. There's also a wonderfully mannered performance from Henri Richard as the commissioner. Commanding acting such as that on display here is surely the most important asset any picture can have. Regardless of how it fits into the general scheme of his work, Lang was right about Liliom. It is one of his best.

Saw this picture was playing at the Film Forum so I said, what the heck, why not? At least I can compare it to "Carousel". And so, I was not prepared for it and was pleasantly surprised. It is a minimalist (to use current artsy language) version with spare sets and shot entirely on a sound stage, and featuring Charles Boyer as Liliom as I had never seen him before. It was a great performance from Boyer, almost unrecognizable from the oily gigolo types he played in Hollywood. Boisterous and exuberant, he brings his character to life, and now I can't imagine anyone else playing this role.

Apart from no musical score, this picture differs from "Carousel" as Liliom enters his afterlife. In "Carousel", the sequence in heaven was almost an afterthought, but here Lang infuses it with some touches that are both surreal and extremely imaginative, and without the benefit of digital enhancement. No special effects here. I didn't care for Madeleine Ozeray's interpretation of the Julie character, which came off as naive and withdrawn, almost a form of neurosis. But she, like the rest of the cast, stayed out of Boyer's way. Recommended - see it if you are a fan of actors and acting.

It seems as though when Fritz Lang fled Germany to France he ended up in a situation where his producer, Erich Pommer, started up a new production company with two films and two directors. There was this, and there was Max Ophuls' A Man Has Been Stolen. Ophuls would later go on to say that Pommer had assigned the wrong projects to the wrong directors, feeling that Liliom more easily fit his own sensibilities while A Man Has Been Stolen more closely fit Lang's. Well, I haven't seen A Man Has Been Stolen, but I have seen a handful of Ophuls' films (most notably Madame de...), and Liliom does feel more like a Ophuls film than a Lang film. In fact, it would fit more comfortably in Jean Cocteau's or even Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's bodies of work than Fritz Lang's. There are still motifs that Lang pursued here, especially regarding the police as a tool of the destiny-machine, but, especially the ending, feels much more ephemeral and light-hearted than Lang had produced up to this point.

It is the story of the titular character Liliom (Charles Boyer), a carnival barker who runs the local carrousel, being brash with the men, tender with the attractive women, and singing songs as they go round in circles to great success. He's such a success that the woman who runs the place, Madame Moscat (Florelle), who has a thing for the attractive young man, can't bring herself to limit Liliom's actions until he goes too far in holding the waist of Julie (Madeleine Ozeray) one night. It blows up, she fires him, and he walks off with Julie, ready to move on with his life. She's an innocent who's completely consumed by her affections for this bad boy instantly, telling him that she's willing to give him everything she has (very little though she has) even though she doesn't love him.

They move into a shack on her aunt's property where she is a photographer for well-to-do middle-class businessmen. The aunt, Madame Menoux (Maximilienne) dislikes Liliom completely and often tries to convince Julie to leave the young man when he disappears all day, never gets a job, and only occasionally comes home at night. She wants Julie to marry the carpenter coming to have his picture taken instead, but Julie is too smitten with Liliom to leave him. It all nearly comes crashing down when Madame Moscat shows up one day to try and entice Liliom back to the carnival with tales of how the carrousel is not doing as well as it had been, an obvious excuse to get her favorite eye candy (and perhaps more) back into her own clutches. Liliom is ready to go, but Julie lays a new development on him that convinces him to stay.

He can't be a lay about anymore. He has to make something of himself, so he agrees to go along with a friend to rob a payroll clerk of sixty-thousand francs, an exercise that goes poorly, ending with Liliom on death's door. Now, this film had some bit of controversy at the time because the Catholic Church objected to the silly nature of the vision of heaven. It is definitely silly (the largely theological and moral problem comes in the film's final moment), but entertainingly so. It reminded me of the later take on heaven from Powell and Pressburger in A Matter of Life and Death, but not nearly as ornate and expensive.

The ideas behind the film involve justice, namely the justice meted out to the lower rungs of society. When Liliom and his friend wait outside a policeman's office for hours, they talk about how if they were to ever die, they'd never see God, for God would only relegate his time for the higher ups, just like in that police station where Liliom has to wait hours to see a low-level flunky but a well-dressed man gets right through to the inspector's office without waiting. That gets mirrored in heaven (feeding a small idea of mine that the movie never really explores that the whole Heaven scenario is just in Liliom's dying mind) where the setup is the same, using the same actors. It's amusing and light.

The weird final moment, where Julie explains that hitting without hurting is fine feels like it was written by a man who abused women and thought it was okay. It's really weird, and it's also the final five seconds of an otherwise charming little film.

This has the feel of a cheap and somewhat rushed production. It was the only film Lang made in France during this period, much like Billy Wilder, quickly moving on to America where he would land firmly and quickly, within a couple of years making his first American film (unlike Wilder who languished for a few years). It's on a limited number of sets with a small cast and the heaven stuff is charming but small. It's a transition picture for Lang as he tried to figure out how he was going to work in a strange, new world where he wasn't welcome at his home after having been shuffled around a bit in his final years there. It's not quite the right fit for Lang, though he does it well enough, showing off his ability to work within different genres and tones. It was also reportedly Lang's favorite of his films, and that difference from the rest of his work could explain it to some degree.

Still, I liked it. It was nice. It had a surprising edge around the middle regarding Liliom himself. The heaven stuff is delightful. The very, very end is weird and off-putting, though.

Well, that is out of the three versions - the 1956 Carousel, the 1930, Frank Borzage version and this one, 1934 Fritz Lang. Of these three - I will leave aside the glamour coefficient and go with the execution of the theme, and then Borzage closely but quite significantly trails Lang, carousel is no where in reckoning. But that was a musical, so probably the other aspects - acting of the leads, or the execution of the plot, was considered tertiary.

There are very minor differences in plot, the secondary leads of Mary - in the two American Versions have a sweetheart, whom they marry. This is an aspect closer to the original theatrical version, where the husbands had been a bit stuffed shirt type (as especially made out in the Carousel) . Lang kept this aspect under cover. However that is really a distance subplot of the main one, so didn't matter much.

Another difference was in the ending, unlike the original, the carousel and Lang made a bit of positive ending, whereas Borzage left it in undefined state. Looking at the character as defined in the original, as well as all the three movies, the Theatrical version was justified. Though there too some doubts remain - the name Liliom seem to signify that he was finally pardoned in the afterlife. Of course Borzage kept his Liliom deserving sympathy, and not as out and out rascal as the others did.

What really makes this version stand out was the treatment and also the excellent portrayal by the two main characters - Liliom (Charles Boyer) and Julie (Madeleine Ozeray). Both were superb in the roles that they were enacting. Boyer as the completely loafer-degenerate- skirt chaser (even after marriage - with Vivian Romance, in her pre-star days as an also) a thoroughly unlikable person, only changed a bit once the responsibility (impending fatherhood) was divulged. Madeliene was equally superb in her role as the girl so head over heels in love that she was ready to close her eyes to any and everything. In Borzage version she had been somewhat of a nagging than the forgive-all self-sacrificing wife and hence the unconditional sympathy of the audience was lost. The unrelated Boarding housekeeper Mme Hollund was Liliom's aunt (Lang), Julie's Aunt (Borzage) and Julie's quite well to do cousin (Carousel) - and hence the attitude in Lang version was most understood - since in either of the other two cases, there was no need for Julie to work as housemaid, with an assistant work available at her aunt/ cousin's place.

Lang has tried to, and has quite successfully, brought out the soft core in his Liliom - especially in in two segments - first was where despite his denial - of any tenderness towards Julie - the heavenly magistrate played back his thoughts for him - which were exactly opposite of what he said (and that brought some audience sympathy back) and of course towards the end, where there was finally a tear in his eyes - indicating that he had finally been purged.

This is undoubtedly #1, with Borzage abut one point behind it, and Carousel trailing by at least 3-4 points - (incidentally I got this Liliom as a bonus - part of the Carousel double disc)

Whoever knew that Charles Boyer could be so ebullient and charismatic. Since I saw Carousel as a boy when it was released in the UK in 1956 I've known the gist of Ferenc Molnar's play and have been curious about this Fritz Lang French version he made in 1934, as commentators have often said that the musical is inferior to this version. To me, that is to entirely to miss the point about Carousel, which only borrowed, if you like, Liliom, on which Rodgers and Hammerstein hung their musical masterpiece. I don't think that Carousel could have been made with same edgy feel as Liliom as it was intended for a family audience. Liliom is a lazy slob, basically, the same a Billy Bigelow is in the musical, but he's much rougher and we see him slap Julie, the innocent girl he takes up with. Charles Boyer is much more dynamic than Gordon MacRae was but MacRae needed to be more sympathetic for family audiences, although he was still a slob. I can't imagine those R & H songs slotted into Fritz Lang's more realistic film about love and redemption so best to leave comparisons alone. Liliom stands alone as a great fantasy drama with good all round performances and I was lucky to obtain a Blu Ray copy of Carousel from the States on which Liliom was hidden away in the extras, and a lovely clear copy it is. Liliom, the carousel barker, meets Julie and they live together, during which time he treats her pretty badly, slapping her one time and giving up his job to lay around. His employer on the Carousel is also in love with his roguish personality and tries all she can to persuade him to return to the carousel but when he finds out that Julie is pregnant, he gets excited and declines her offer. He commits an attempted murder to get the money they so desperately need and fails, killing himself with his knife to avoid capture and is sent to heaven to see if he can show some redemption. Boyer's death scene is every bit as moving as in Carousel but without the lush R & H score so it's all credit to Fritz Lang that he made such a good job of this film. It's well known that Frank Sinatra pulled out of Carousel just as filming was to start but I can't see him playing this part as well as Boyer as he was a more serious personality and as great a singer as he was, he didn't have Gordon MacRae's range in singing those theatrical songs.