Charles Walters | Lili / 1953

before and after

by Douglas Messerli

 

Helen Deutsch (screenplay, based on a story by Paul Gallico), Charles Walters (director) Lili / 1953

 

In 1961, at the age of 14, at a time when I was utterly infatuated with Broadway musical theater, I purchased the MGM Stereo disc to the musical Carnival, staring Anna Maria Alberghetti, James Mitchell, Jerry Orbach, and Kaye Ballard. Along with West Side Story, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (which opened that same year), and She Loves Me (which appeared a couple of years later), it quickly became one of my favorite of listening experiences. I haven’t heard that now quite-worn out record for decades.

 

    Although I listened to these recordings and numerous others that I had purchased with my newspaper monies I was supposed to be saving for college, I had seen very few musicals in person, and was forced to simply conjure them up through the extensive liner-notes and the pictures inside the album. You probably couldn’t have been able to convince me that I actually hadn’t seen these productions, so real did my imagination render what was missing. And amazingly, probably in about 1962 or 1963, a production of Carnival was produced in Cedar Rapids at Coe College, which must have been part of a traveling company or, more likely, a student production. To me, witnessing only my second “Broadway” musical (if you exclude high school productions; I’d previously seen amateur productions of the local Cedar Rapids theater company of Damn Yankees and The Boy Friend), it was almost as magical as the recording—although no one could sing Mira like Alberghetti (as I recount in My Year 2007, I later met Alberghetti at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art event) and there was no man so handsome and suave in my childhood imagination than James Mitchell as Marco the Magnificent! Had I been Lili, I probably would have also stalked his trailer.

     The libretto by Michael Stewart, was based on the movie Lili, with a screenplay by Helen Deutsch. For Christmas this year, I bought a DVD of that 1953 film which Howard and I watched on New Year’s Eve.

     Carnival is certainly a better version of Paul Gallico story. But there is still some charm, along with a great deal of syrupy sentiment in Charles Walters’ rendition of Lili. The story is so slight that it’s hard to imagine that it actually supports the 81 minutes of screen time. A young waif, Lili (Leslie Caron) suddenly appears in a small provincial French town, hoping for a job with a local baker whom her father had known. But the baker has apparently died since she has written him, and his shop is closed. The naïve girl, accordingly, has nowhere to go.

 

    A next-door shopkeeper momentarily takes her in, offering her a bed; but it quickly becomes apparent that he is determined to sexually abuse her. A local carnival magician, Marcus the Magnificent (Jean-Pierre Aumont), visiting the shop in search of handkerchiefs to use in his act, rescues her, and, she, amazed by his magic tricks and handsome demeanor, follows him, along with the carnival’s puppeteer, Paul Berthalet (Mel Farrar) and his partner, Jacquot (Kurt Kasznar), back to the location in which the players are setting up their stands.

     Unable to get rid of the likeable pest, Marcus arranges a job for her waiting tables at the carnival dining hall; but Lili is so inept at the job and so awestruck by Marcus’ performance with his sequined-gowned assistant, Rosalie (Zsa-Zsa Gabor), that she stops working, mouth agape in the wonderment of their performance, and is quickly fired.

      Depressed by her lack of future possibilities, the young girl is almost suicidal until nearby puppets, one by one, call out to her, and engage her in conversation. The young engaging boy puppet, Carrot Top, along with his friends, the thieving fox Reynardo, the cowardly giant Golo, and the vain ballerina Marguerite, engage Lili in a conversation, she responding so naturally and innocently to them that a crowd gathers round to watch their interchanges, the slightly bitter puppeteer realizing that Lili is a natural draw for his show.

     Paul and Jacquot offer her a place to sleep and a share of their sales; and after a few days she and the puppet show grows to be such a hit that agents from another show are drawn to visit the “act.”

 

    Over these few days of her employment, Lili gradually discovers from Jocquot that Paul is bitter because he had been a great dancer, whose career was suddenly destroyed by an accident which crippled him. Still, Paul, who spends much of his time drinking and sourly commenting on the world around him, frightens the young girl, who, like the child she still is, does not quite connect the fact the friendly puppets with whom she enjoyably communicates are actually being manipulated and voiced by Paul and Jacquot.

    A visit in Lili’s trailer from Marcus, clearly attracted to the budding young beauty, further infuriates Paul, as he attempts to explain to Lili that, in her innocence, she is encouraging a sexual relationship with the intruder. When he finds Paul wedding ring on the couch, he slaps the girl, insisting that she is determined to become a whore.

     Meanwhile, Marcus and Rosalie, to whom Marcus is secretly married, have been offered a venue elsewhere and plan to leave; Lili, now recognizing that he and his assistant are married, pays Marcus one last visit, apologizing for her childish infatuation with him and telling him that she now plans to leave the circus.

    Two impresarios, who have been watching Paul, Jacquot, and Lili’s performances, praise Paul’s talent and offer the puppeteer and his company a better situation. As Lili prepares to leave, the puppets attempt to lure her back. She briefly returns to them to say goodbye, but cannot be talked out of departing, and soon returns to the road, dashing Paul’s plans for a new life.

     As she leaves the city behind, she is suddenly joined by her four puppet friends, who have suddenly grown to adult-size creatures, each of whom dance with her in a ballet-dream sequence that reminds one a bit of a fantastical scenes out of Fellini films. In this final encounter with her imaginary friends, Lili suddenly realizes that what truly existed behind their words was a loving (but very human—sometimes selfish, vain, and even cruel) Paul. As a suddenly grown-up woman, Lili rushes back to the carnival.

   Even if we have been thoroughly engaged by the somewhat magical theatrics of this tale, and enchanted, at moments by Caron’s performance—which The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther lavished with adjectives such as “elfin,” “winsome,” “gracious,” “charming,” “vital,” etc.—we can’t help but doubt that, as a suddenly grown woman, Lili can again return to the totally innocence engagement with her puppet friends upon her return. It is the man behind them she now desires, and, in that fact, surely the magic spell of theater will have been broken. If she continues to enact her previous role, she will now do so as an actor.

     Will Paul, now that he perhaps realizes that his real gift is puppetry rather than dancing, be able to contain all of those contrary aspects of self (Carrot Top, Golo, Reynardo, and Marguerite) within him? Has Lili unmasked his personae, forcing him to now become simply the loving and kind man in is at heart?

     Now that the carnival has clearly gone out of business, will these individuals be able to continue such daringly genuine-seeming performances? We can only fear that that the element of utter belief and wonderment has been consumed by desire, that art has been replaced by life. And in that recognition, we also realize just how much pretense was necessary to move our hearts throughout this film from the very beginning. Art, in short, is consumed in Lili by the real. And reality, in turn, makes all that preceded it somewhat childish, awkward, gangly, even kitsch. Caron, with her saucer-large eyes reminds us at moments of the wide-eyed, crying Keane paintings of lowbrow collectors? There is something slightly embarrassing, accordingly, about the whole sentimental fable which we’ve just experienced. And all of this helps to reiterate those many uncomfortable moments when we sense that the men surrounding Lili are about to reveal the work’s pedophilic propensities, while the alcoholic rages of Paul hint at the possibility of a truly brutal abuse. Perhaps it’s no accident that we’re never permitted to witness Lili’s reunion with puppeteer and the figures he’s manipulated to get her love.

     And at that moment any reasonable moviegoer is forced to look back over what he or she has just experienced and suddenly can’t help but to perceive it in an entirely different manner. Fiction writer and general commentator John Weir, whose grumbling cynicism I’ve grown quite fond of, recently wrote that he too rented the movie and sat down to enjoy a film filled with sentimental memories, but found something in it that I realized only at the end of the picture—that what I had just witnessed was basically an attempted rape by three men of an underage child (at least given the definitions or many countries and numerous of the US states). Weir’s commentary is quite hilarious:

 

“I was ready to be moved by how touching Leslie Caron is, and she is indeed touching, she was 20 or 21 when the film was shot, though her character, Lili, is 16, and the first thing that happens to her… “She wanders into a provincial town somewhere in France, alone, with a suitcase and a drab green dress and silly green hat with a daisy on the brim ("She loves me, she loves me not"), looking for her uncle, who's dead, her father is also dead, no mention of a mother, or siblings, she's an orphan, with no one in the world, and a shopkeeper dude three times her age says he'll give her a job, and he takes her in the back of his store to feed her some cheese, and gets ready to rape her.

     She's in the back with the cheese and the rapist. She's screaming. We hear the screams from the front of the store when Jean-Pierre Aumont walks in, he's a magician in the nearby carnival, also a seducer, he was born—the actor was born—in 1911, so he's 20 years older than Leslie Caron in real life, and clearly at least 20 years older than Lili in movie life, he walks into the store as if her savior, she runs into the front of the store screaming and pursued by the storekeeper, Jean-Pierre Aumont has interrupted the rape, which, he'd have to be stupid not to know what he's walked in on, but he's unconcerned, he smiles at Lili, "Oh you pretty silly thing," rape is no big deal to him, she leaves the store, he leaves the store—and immediately of course she has fallen in love with him!

     We're meant to think he saved her from something, but it was only through circumstance, not from anything he did. She's in love with him, though, and follows him to the carnival, and he takes her into his trailer, she's 16, and he is clearly evaluating her sexually, he touches her hair, the side of her face, and thinks, "Not now, maybe later."

     And so now she's been sexually harassed by two men, the only difference between them that one's an old icky guy, and one's an old cute guy (old in relation to her), and then she wanders lost and alone for a bit, works as a carnival waitress in a skirt cut high enough to let us evaluate her buttocks, we're made complicit with the sexual evaluation to which the men subject her and she gets fired from the waitress job and decides to kill herself, but then another White Male Savior shows up, third in a row, and it's Mel Ferrer who's a puppeteer really tall and wounded he was "in the war" and got wounded like Jake Barnes in Hemingway and calls himself "lame" and limps around and hates the world because he'd been a famous dancer, but he can't dance anymore, because of his limp, but it turns out he's a genius puppeteer.

    And speaking through his puppets he saves Lili's life and falls in love with her and evaluates her sexually and slaps her hard because she doesn't want him and then Jean-Pierre Aumont grabs Zsa Zsa Gabor and says "We're out of here," and they flee, and then Lili flees, but in her flight she remembers that one of the puppets Mel Ferrer puppeteers with is a big sad bear-y puppet who's awkward and sweet and only wants love so—Spoiler Alert!—she goes back to Mel Ferrer in the last 30 seconds of the movie and now she loves him, and he doesn't have to slap her anymore.”

 

      Moreover, Weir argued something that had completely eluded me, that the dancer Paul’s friend, Jacquot, with whom he manipulates the puppets and appears to live with in the small circus trailer is a gay man, a kind of “pet gay” as Weir describes him, who obviously loves Paul and protects him from his worst instincts, including his general cynicism and his maltreatment of Lili. The two, Paul and Jacquot, live is such claustrophobic closeness that it is ultimately difficult to imagine Lili actually wedging her way between them when she returns to claim her “hero.” And how their relationship might be resolved upon her reentry presents the film’s probable ending with an even more improbable solution. 

     If the musical Carnival is a superior work, it is perhaps because the stage musical, in its presentation of the more lurid aspects of the carney-life—evidenced in scenes with the Incomparable Rosalie (Kay Ballard) and the circus proprietor B. F. Schlegel (Henry Lascoe) singing “Humming,” and in the hammy self-preening ballad sung by Marco the Magnificent (James Mitchell) “Sword, Rose, and Cape”—Bob Merrill’s musical displayed the seedy reality of this fly-by-night circus in opposition to Lili’s distorted view of it. In the musical we know, right up front, that, despite Lili’s desires for “Everything to be the same” as in her remembered childhood in Mira, everything thereafter will be different, while Walters Lili pretends things always stay the way they were before.

      The director, Charles Walters, a gay man, had also early in his life been a dancer who introduced on stage the remarkable Cole Porter numbers, “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things,” performing in numerous musicals before becoming a director. This work, despite its many flaws, may have been one of his best, although there are some moments of Easter Parade that I still enjoy.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2015; revised February 1, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).