“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise.
It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, where, in a final section of pure Hollywood fantasy, he is given a second chance.
The actor playing Liliom for another. Charles Boyer is more associated with stuffed shirts but here he’s a youthful, sexy bit of rough as Liliom, the self-regarding piece of work who’ll argue anything with anybody, even the guy with the ledger Upstairs.
And for a third the film-making style. It’s entirely unrepresentative of Lang’s other movies. Neither expressionist nor epic nor fluidly noir, it’s a wholesale lurch into the French poetic realist style, thanks in large part to the lighting of Rudolph Maté, who’d go on to work for Welles and Hitchcock but at this point was also doing great things for the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer and René Clair.
Lang is en route from Nazi Germany to Hollywood at this point in his life, so a different style has its own metaphorical meaning. If only we could get a better look at this film. All the versions I’ve seen, even the Kino restoration, are visually poor, soft affairs, with persistent hums on the audio. They don’t ruin the film but they do downgrade the viewing experience. Will we ever get a decent version?
What still shines through, punches through in fact, is Lang’s brilliant way with pace. This film moves at speed and is full of little moments of shorthand storytelling, to match the light-as-air tone, as if Lubitsch were somehow involved. There is even comedy, something as rare as hen’s teeth in the Lang oeuvre.
But to the battered wife, Julie, played with pluck and stoicism by Madeleine Ozeray, who suggests there is some quid pro quo to balance out the violence in Julie’s life. Maybe being with a forceful guy satisfies her idea of what a man is. Maybe the sex is really good. Both are there in Ozeray’s performance. And also in the fabulous performance by Florelle, as the owner of the carnival who sees Liliom as a sex machine, fires him when she gets jealous of Julie and then has a change of heart, presumably after a change of underwear.
It’s all clearly done on the cheap and here and there you can see just how cheap, but Lang manages magical moments on the equivalent of cardboard and string, particularly in the fantasy sequences, when Liliom dies and goes into the afterlife. These prefigure Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, right down to a crucial plot detail. They must have seen it.
Franz Waxman is listed in the credits as supplying the score – he was also en route to Hollywood and stopping over in Paris (where he also scored Billy Wilder’s Bad Seed) – and he supplies the usual lusty orchestral Waxman score (along with Max Steiner Waxman has been the benchmark for Hollywood ever since). But alongside his is the name of Jean Lenoir, best known as a writer of chansons, who is possibly (this is a wild guess, since it’s so un-Waxman) responsible for the experimental, electronic sounds that feature once Liliom goes on to his reckoning with the Almighty’s clerks.
If a wife-beating carnival barker who dies but gets a crack at redemption sounds familiar, it’s also the plot to Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical using the same 1909 play as Lang as source material, as had Michael Curtiz in his 1919 film adaptation and Frank Borzage in his 1930 version. Whatever else you think of it, this story has legs.
Liliom – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
