Liliom (Borzage, 1930)
My Summer Movies # 10
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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. (More here.)
(image via shangols)
