Liliom (1930)****
Among the major studios, Fox has always been
the most remiss in putting out older titles from its library. It seems highly
unlikely that a video or DVD of Frank Borzage's great Liliom (1930)
will appear in the new future, unless Amazon.com launches a campaign for its
release as it has for Friedrich Murnau's Sunrise. Nevertheless, I think
it worth passing along the following remarks, since the film's exquisite
synthesis of realism and romanticism contrasts so strikingly with the inept
stylistic fumbling of Frequency.
I am profoundly indebted to the UCLA Film and Television Archive for making it
possible for me to view a beautiful 35mm tinted nitrate print of the film.
One of the most artistically satisfying examples of
the romantic style of direction would be Frank Borzage's film version of the American
adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, a play that rather uneasily
combines a naturalistic tale of a carnival barker who leads a young girl
astray with a fantastic account of the barker's journey to the afterworld
following his death in an attempted robbery. Clearly, Borzage was working with
a prestigious subject: Molnar's play had first been
a success in Europe and then subsequently in this country when it was staged
by the Theatre Guild in the 1920's. Fox, aware of the play's reputation,
brought the American adaptor, S.N. Behrman, to Hollywood for the first of a
number of stints as screenwriter. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Fox
gave Borzage the directing assignment owing to the success he had had with the
romance genre ever since filming Seventh Heaven in 1927; in addition,
the coherency of the picture with his later work makes it clear he approached
the assignment as if he filming a love story more than a screen adaptation of
a famous play--a procedure that nevertheless led to disastrous results when he
filmed Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 1932.
Two things strike the attention of a viewer who
watches Liliom today. The first is the extent to which the movie
presents the action from the point of view of the young girl Julie (Rose
Hobart) rather than that of the titular hero, played by Charles Farrell. The
film begins with an astonishing close up of Julie gazing dreamily into space
as she puts away glasses in the house where she works as a servant girl. The
film's subsequent action all develops out of this opening shot; the adventure
Julie will undergo is itself the fulfillment of her romantic longings, the
fantasy come true of one great love whose memory will last throughout her
life. By contrast, Liliom serves mainly as a foil for her passion--not
a bad move, since Farrell, decked out with an unconvincing wispy mustache,
makes a curiously effete Liliom, especially in comparison with the gutsy
performance of Charles Boyer in the same role, in the French version directed
by Fritz Lang in 1933. Nor does the movie attempt to depict him as a
goodhearted rogue as did Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in Carousel;
although Liliom attempts to steal money so that he and Julie can emigrate to
the United States, he not only physically abuses her but refuses to listen
when she tries to tell him she is pregnant, and dies without ever knowing he
is about to become a father. In this way, Liliom upsets the usual
conventions of the genre, making the man the passive object and the woman the
lover who invests the relationship with her most profound emotions.
Unlike Rodgers and Hammerstein's execrable
musical play which blares out the "Love Conquers All" moral of its
librettist that lumbers through all their collaborations, Liliom
emphasizes the fragility and transitoriness of love, threatened on one side by
the vagaries of human emotion and on the other by the forces of
authoritarianism. Writing of Borzage's later anti-Nazi pictures, Andrew Sarris
commented that for the director "What Hitler and all tyrants represented
most reprehensibly was an invasion of the emotional privacy of individuals,
particularly lovers...." But Liliom, made before Hitler's rise to
power in 1933, presents the opposition between instinctual gratification and
social repression unencumbered by political references, with a directness only
possible in pre-code days. In one amazing episode early in the film Liliom and
Julie go to a park above the amusement park where he works: the two lovers sit
on top of a knoll with the lights of the carnival in the distance when
suddenly two bodies rise up and block the frame, those of two policemen who
have come upon them. There is nothing benign or humorous about this intrusion;
the abruptness with which the two figures enter the frame gives the visual
gesture the effect of an act of violence. A scene like this, not to mention
Liliom's outsider status as well as the union unblessed by the bonds of
matrimony, make the film as much an attack upon conventional morality and
respectability as a glorification of the power of love. In the coming years,
the combination of these two themes would play an increasingly important role
in numerous films, but in no other genre would it figure quite so prominently
as in the exotic.
The other thing about Liliom that would
strike a viewer's attention today is the film's powerful visual stylization,
both in cinematography--by Chester Lyons--and decor. Rather than striving to
recreate Budapest on the Fox lot, the film's designers decided to create sets
which suggest a vaguely Central European setting, a wise decision as
comparison with the movie Budapest of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop around the
Corner reveals. The latter picture's sets neither look like Budapest nor
do they, as do the sets in Liliom, allow free play to the viewer's
imagination; more than anything else, they look like sets created for an MGM
movie--a minor but distracting flaw in a great movie. The distance between the
two movies, only a short one if measured in years, demonstrates how much the
creative freedom of the silent era continued to exist into the early sound
period. By the end of the decade, it would have been virtually eliminated by
the standardization of production, relegated to such genres as fantasy and the
musical.
Nowhere in the film does this freedom manifest
itself so strikingly as in the scene of Liliom's death: after being shot by
the watchman he intends to rob, he is brought back to the house of Julie's
aunt. In a long shot, on the right side of the frame, illuminated only by a
candle, he lies on his death bed attended by Julie and her aunt, while in the
center through a large window appear the ever present lights of the
fairground. At the moment of his death, into this superbly organized
composition, the celestial railroad which has come to carry him off crashes
through the window. In an instant, the space of the image undergoes a complete
transformation: the quotidian setting, resembling a Dutch genre painting,
becomes an enchanted one. Yet, however impressive the arrival of the train,
the force of the transformation results from a restricted use of visual
resources--patches of black and white, the light above Liliom's bed and the
lights on the ferris wheel which can be seen revolving through the window,
juxtaposed with the surrounding darkness. The film should have stopped at this
point; unfortunately, faithful to the play, it follows Liliom on his journey
to the underworld, but recovers at the end when Liliom briefly meets his
daughter and concludes with a Brueghel-like composition which shows Julie's
miserable cottage in the foreground while in the background an ultra-modern
express carries off Liliom, presumably to the infernal regions.
In an article on Borzage's films, Burton J.
Shapiro complains that the earlier film Street Angel "suffers from
an almost unbearable Germanic heaviness...." Whether that is true or not,
Liliom certainly shows how well American film makers had mastered the
lessons of German studio production, lessons which Borzage employs to great
effect in this picture in his use of lighting and his imaginative handling of
space. Nevertheless, Liliom has nothing of the austerity or high drama
of a film by Lang or Murnau; the German director with whose work it does have
an affinity is that of Max Ophuls, who was then just embarking upon his
career. Narratively, the affinity appears in the story of a woman whose
otherwise empty life is elevated by a great love--the plot of Ophuls' great
motion picture The Earings of Madame de.... At a formal level, the link
is the amusement park with its ferris wheel and merry-go-round which casts an
alternating pattern of light and shadow on the wall behind the lovers when
they first speak to one another. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried
Kracauer, referring to a shot in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which
shows "the top of a merry-go-round which never ceases its circular
movement," says that "The circle here becomes a symbol of
chaos"--an idea that no doubt occurred to Alfred Hitchcock when he made Strangers
on a Train. But there is nothing chaotic about the circular movement in Liliom;
like comparable devices in Ophuls--the carousel in La Ronde, the
waltzes in The Earrings of Madame de..., the elaborate circular dolly
shots in Lola Montes--the spin of the merry-go-round embodies the whirl
of life itself, carrying everything along with it. As Liliom dies, the lights
of the ferris wheel continue to revolve in the distance, yet without the least
connotation of fatality, unlike the the light which intrudes upon the abject
porter in The Last Laugh. In Liliom, the recurrent association
of movement with light symbolizes the spectacle of life itself, in all its
beauty and pathos, that goes on after the death of the individual.
U-571
Frequency
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