Liliom

Plot synopsis:
The play takes place partly in Budapest, Hungary, and partly in a waiting area just outside Heaven. The story concerns Liliom, a tough, cocky carousel barker who falls in love with Julie, a young woman who works as a maid. When both lose their jobs, Liliom begins mistreating Julie out of bitterness — even slapping her once — although he loves her. When she discovers she is pregnant, he is deliriously happy, but, unbeknownst to Julie, he agrees to participate with his friend Ficsur, a criminal, in a hold-up to obtain money to provide for the child. Liliom is unwilling to leave Julie and return to his jealous former employer, the carousel owner Mrs. Muskat, and feels that the robbery is his only way left to obtain financial security. The hold-up is a disaster, but Ficsur escapes, and Liliom kills himself to avoid capture. He is sent to a fiery place, presumably Purgatory. Sixteen years later, he is allowed to return to Earth for one day to do a good deed for his now teenage daughter, Louise, whom he has never met. If he succeeds, he will be allowed to enter Heaven. He fails in the attempt, and is presumably sent to Hell. The ending, though, focuses on Julie, who obviously remembers Liliom fondly.
A contrasting subplot involves Julie's best friend, Marie, and Wolf Beifeld, a rather pompous hotel porter who marries Marie and finally becomes the wealthy owner of the hotel at which he once worked. The two eventually have seven children, who never appear onstage in Molnár's play. There is also a Carpenter in Liliom who is in unrequited love with Julie, and who, in contrast to Liliom, has a stable job.

Tags: romantic

Review:
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.
Corny and theatrical, sure, but also strange, beautiful, well-acted, and filmed with an eye that was a generation ahead of its time..
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!
But in this movie, Boyer plays a role that (even five years later) would have been reserved exclusively for Jean Gabin.
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.
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!
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.
It stands comparison with Lang's best work from Berlin or Hollywood.
"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.
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.
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.
Ferenc Molnar's great play about a doomed carousel barker who revisits his wife & daughter after death; it's CAROUSEL without the Rodgers & Hammerstein's score...
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.
A near great film..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of how it fits into the general scheme of his work, Lang was right about Liliom.
Ferenc Molnar according to David Ewen's book on Richard Rodgers turned down Giacomo Puccini to do an opera on Liliom.
Liliom be remembered as a Molnar play than a Puccini opera.
musical Carousel.
Watching Liliom now is like watching George Bernard
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
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.
in if you must, but this Liliom is a classic unto itself..
Saw this picture was playing at the Film Forum so I said, what the heck, why not?
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.
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.
Offbeat French fantasy film.
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).
Exited 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.
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"..
Charles Boyer in an interesting role.
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..
Liliom is not a masterpiece of cinema, but not a terrible movie.
There is doubt, but Liliom is no more or less than the account of a proud man who believes himself strong and who breaks the heart of his wife and who pays the price.
It is a story based on the moral sense of a young man and the viewer is reflected in the message of the film.
Liliom, meanwhile, is vicious and manipulative, but he has necessarily good in him.This feature is fortunately not that a beast series of annoying scenes.
The film opens on a noisy stage, or a thundering music tries to surpass the cries of Liliom and extras.
Moreover, we witness a battle scene where the noise stops completely for a minute when Liliom and his colleague of the circus look at each other intensely.
Some shots without music are much too long, allowing us to appreciate the soft sound of the film in the beginning of the talk, but also to fall asleep.
No, Liliom, he takes his time.
It does not prevent that the film is played by very good actors.
All the replies of Charles Boyer are sublime, every time his character opens his mouth, we want to laugh out loud.
Liliom may well be arrogant and we hate him a little because of this, but we find each of the exchanges he makes with the characters more or less secondary very entertaining.
Madeleine Ozeray and Florelle both perform a convincing performance, despite a game a bit too stretched.
We love him so much in the role of the commissioner as in that of the angel who judges.We can also note the strangeness of the music of the film.
Insupportable circus music comes back at several moments, even during certain dramatic scenes where the atmosphere is heavy.
Music completely opposite to the emotion created by the characters playing on the screen has no effect.
The part that follows the death of Liliom is probably the most interesting.
The film turns to the real fanciful comedy when the main character resurrects and is transported to heaven by two men dressed perfectly shadows of blacks with a complexion white as snow and that he is judged by an angel.
In this sequence, we have the confirmation that the film is not serious, but the scene breaks the monotony whose film has appeared since the beginning and the spectator, suddenly, comes out of its passive state.
We see the arrival of new characters, the film changes costumes and sets and the dramatic tone before disappears to give way to a much lighter tone, until the end.
Liliom deserves to be seen, but not to the point of being a classic.
There are a lot of very positive reviews for this film and it was apparently director Fritz Lang's favorite film.
Despite this, I really had a hard time sticking with this fantasy film.
I think the biggest reason is that the central character, Liliom, is basically an unlikable jerk.
When things turn disastrous for him late in the film, I just didn't care--a serious problem with any film.The film begins with Charles Boyer playing Liliom--a hard-living sociopath who lies, beats women, loves fighting and is completely lazy.
It's a decent character study of an Antisocial personality but he's completely unpleasant and totally superficial.Throughout the film, he lives off and uses women.
He goes to Heaven, they send him to Pergatory and, oddly, they let him go back to Earth to see his wife and daughter (who was born after his death).
This part is much more interesting, but the special effects for Heaven (even by 1930s standards) are pretty poor.The entire film just left me flat.
If the film were remade (other than as the musical CAROUSEL), better special effects AND making Liliom somewhat likable and helping the audience to understand more about what a woman might like about him would help immensely.
I wanted to like this film (as I love French films AND the films of Fritz Lang), but just couldn't.
Boyer's Plot.
As a rule in his Hollywood films Charles Boyer was never called upon to show much animation - of course I haven't seen them all as I can take or leave him - and usually personified gravitas, ruthlessness even, stone- face etc.
In fact the only role I can think of where he unleashed any exuberance was a late one, in Barefoot In The Park, so it's something of a revelation to see him in the opening scenes of Liliom, breaking in and keeping warm the striped jersey for Gordon Macrae in Carousel.
Trivia buffs will appreciate an early glimpse of Viviane Romance and Florelle is also on hand in her pre-Le Crime of Monsieur Lange days.
Anyone who has seen Carousel will be struck at how closely it adheres to Liliom and vice versa.
Personally I failed to detect any Langisms but I do take exception to one poster who dismissed Billy Wilder's work in France as 'negligible' and lauding Weill's insipid Seven Deadly Sins.