For other Lilis, see Lili (disambiguation)

Lili
Directed by	Charles Walters
Produced by	Edwin H. Knopf
Written by	Helen Deutsch Paul Gallico (story Love of Seven Dolls)
Starring	Leslie Caron Mel Ferrer Jean-Pierre Aumont Zsa Zsa Gabor
Music by	Bronislau Kaper
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Release date(s)	March 10, 1953
Running time	81 min
Language	English
IMDb profile

Lili is a 1953 American film. Considered one among many classic MGM releases, it stars Leslie Caron as a touchingly naïve French girl, whose emotional relationship with a carnival puppeteer is conducted through the medium of four puppets. The screenplay by Helen Deutsch was adapted from "The Man Who Hated People," a short story by Paul Gallico which appeared in the October 28, 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post ^[1]. Following the film's success, Gallico expanded his story into a 1954 novella entitled The Love of Seven Dolls.

It won the Academy Award for Original Music Score and was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Caron), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Color), Best Cinematography (Color), Best Director (Charles Walters) and Best Original Screenplay.

Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer's rendition of "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo" was released as a single and became a minor hit, reaching #30 on the pop music charts.

The film was adapted for the stage under the title Carnival.

Plot summary

Lili is a simple, naive girl who arrives in Paris for a job in a bakery. However, the baker, who was a friend of her recently deceased father, has himself passed on. Sadly, there is no job for Lili, and no prospects for her as well. Lili then encounters the owner of a clothing store who perhaps has less than noble intentions. During a brief altercation with the owner of the clothing store, she meets and attaches herself to handsome magician that has an act in a passing carnival. Not wanting to be separated from the man, Lili takes a job as a waitress in the carnival, but gets fired when she spends her time watching the magic act instead of waiting tables. Not knowing what to do, Lili consults the magician for advice, but he simply tells her to go back to where she came from. Homeless and heartbroken she contemplates suicide and is unaware that she is being watched by the carnival's puppeteer. He stops her by striking up a conversation with her through his puppets in the forms of a red-haired boy, a sly wolf, a vain dancer, and a silly giant. Soon a large group of carnival workers gathers and they enjoy watching Lili's direct interaction with the puppets as she is seemingly unaware that there is a puppeteer behind the curtain. After the show Lili is offered a job with her new puppet friends and becomes a valuable part of the act.

The puppeteer, played by Mel Ferrer, is gruff and emotionally cold, ever since a leg injury in World War II put an end to his promising career as a dancer. He falls in love with Lili and portrays his feelings for through his puppets, but Lili is unaware of this and she continues to pursue a relationship with the magician. When the puppeteer returns drunk to the trailer that he shares with Lili and his assistant/friend, he accidentally kicks his injured leg against the wall and Lili rushes to him to make sure that he isn't hurt. But then he looks at her with a sort of affection and Lili fearfully backs away from him wondering why she had been so worried about him. The puppeteer then starts to follow Lili around trying to figure out what it is she wants, but the only thing that looks at with longing is a poster for the magicians act. The puppeteer then feels angry and hopeless, thinking that Lili would never want him as she is with the magician every chance she gets.

When Lili later discovers the magician has only been toying with her and is actually married to his assistant, Lili talks to her puppet friends for help. They insist that she should stay at with them and forget about the magician. Lili had always thought of the puppets as people and she tells them that they have come to mean so much to her and almost tells them that she loves them. Then when the puppets embrace her, she pulls back the curtain to reveal the puppeteer. Angrily, Lili says to him "The puppets are my friends, but I forget every time that it's only you." Then he yells at her "I am the puppets!" Then he explains that each of the puppets represents a part of his soul, a part of himself. He goes on to tell her that the act has been offered a big job, but they can only accept it if Lili is in the act. Felling used and as if she's lost everything, Lili leaves the carnival. As she walks away, she imagines that she dances with each of the puppets, now elevated to human size. To her shock, each of the figures turns into the puppeteer and then fades away. Soon Lili realizes that her bond with the puppets was really a bond with the puppeteer. When the last puppet figure becomes the puppeteer, Lili holds him close and doesn't want to let him go. The two hold hands and walk along the road together as Lili would want in her own happy ending. Coming back to reality, Lili runs back to the carnival as fast as her legs will carry her. When she finds the puppeteer, she drops her luggage and runs into his waiting arms. He then kisses her passionatly on the lips and they live happily ever after.

Critical response

The New York Times included it in their 2004 Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,^[2] as did Angie Errigo and Jo Berry in a 2005 compilation of Chick Flicks: Movies Women Love.^[3]

Bosley Crowther, reviewing the movie at its opening, had nothing but praise for the movie, rejoicing that "at last Leslie Caron's simplicity and freshness... have been captured again in the film." He showered other encomia on Caron, calling her "elfin," "winsome," the "focus of warmth and appeal," praising her "charm," "grace," "beauty," and "vitality." He said screenwriter Helen Deutsch had "put together a frankly fanciful romance with clarity, humor, and lack of guile," and admires the choreographer, sets, music, and title song.^[4]

The movie was not universally liked, though; Pauline Kael called it a "sickly whimsy" and referred to Mel Ferrer's "narcissistic, masochistic smiles."

Influence

Audrey Hepburn was fascinated by the movie and identified with the heroine. The movie was a direct cause of her becoming attracted to future husband Mel Ferrer.^[5]

The movie inspired an interest in puppets in then-seven-year-old John Waters, who proceeded to stage violent versions of Punch and Judy for children's birthday parties. Biographer Robert L Pela says that Waters' mother believes the puppets in Lili had the greatest influence on Waters' subsequent career (though Pela believes tacky films at a local drive-in, which the young Waters watched from a distance through binoculars, had a greater effect).^[6]

Production

Walton and O'Rourke, famous in puppeteering circles, made the puppets. They mostly worked in cabarets and did not appear on television. Lili is the only known filmed record of their work. Walton and O'Rourke manipulated Marguerite and Reynardo, George Latshaw was responsible for Carrot Top, and Wolo handled Golo the Giant.^[7]

Love of Seven Dolls

"In Paris in the spring of our times, a young girl was about to throw herself into the Seine." Thus opens the novella from which the film "Lili" and the musical "Carnival" was drawn.

The Paul Gallico short story from which Lili was adapted was published in expanded form in 1954 as Love of Seven Dolls a 125 page novella. The New York Times review of the book opens "Those audiences still making their way to see Lili may now read the book from which this motion picture was adapted." The original short story was clearly based on the popular television puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie, as it takes place in a television studio (not a carnival as in the film and book), and has many characters based on the Kuklapolitans. The novella was far more mystical and magic than the short story. Brettonais from the village of Plouha...."Wretched though she was, some of the mystery of tht mysterious land still clung to her. . the gravity of her glance, the innocence and primative minde. .there were dark corners of Celtic brooding....a little scarecrow."

Helen Deutsch's adaptation is [somewhat] true to the essential core of Gallico's story, but there are many differences, and Gallico's book is far, far darker in tone. In the book, the girl's nickname is Mouche ("fly") rather than Lili. The puppeteer is named Michel Peyrot, stage name Capitaine Coq, rather than Paul Berthalet. He is not a crippled dancer, rather "he was bred out of the gutters of Paris." Yet something moves him to save the potential suicide.

The puppeteer's assistant is a "primitive" Senegalese man named Golo, rather than the movie's amiable Frenchman. He shares with Mouche a sense of prmative magic, and with her believes in the reality of the puppetd.

The first four puppets she meets correspond closely to those in the film and are a youth named Carrot Top; a fox, Reynardo; a vain girl, Gigi; and a "huge, tousle-headed, hideous, yet pathetic-looking giant" Alifanfaron. The latter two are named "Marguerite" and "Golo" in the movie (i.e. the name of the puppeteer's assistant in the book becomes the name of a puppet in the movie). The book includes three additional puppets: a penguin named Dr. Duclos who wears a pince-nez and is a dignified academic; Madame Muscat, "the concierge," who constantly warns Mouche that the others are "a bad lot;" and Monsieur Nicholas, a man with steel-rimmed spectacles, stocking cap, and leather apron, who is "a maker and mender of toys."

The core of both book and movie is the childlike innocence of Mouche/Lili and her simple conviction that she is interacting directly with the puppets themselves, which have some kind of existence separate from the puppeteer. This separation is perfectly explicit in the book. It says that Golo was "childlike ... but in the primitive fashion backed by the dark lore of his race" and looked upon the puppets "as living, breathing creatures." But "the belief in the separate existence of these little people was even more basic with Mouche for it was a necessity to her and a refuge from the storms of life with which she had been unable to cope."

In the movie, the puppeteer, Paul Berthalet, is gruff, unhappy, and emotionally distant. Although Lili refers to him as "the angry man", he is not very cruel or menacing. His bitterness is explained by his identity as a former ballet dancer, disabled by a leg injury and "reduced" to the role of puppeteer.

Gallico's Peyrot, however, is vicious in every sense of the word. No ballet dancer, he was "bred out of the gutters" and by the age of fifteen was "a little savage practiced in all the cruel arts and swindles of the street fairs and cheap carnivals." He has "the look of a satyr." "Throughout his life no one had ever been kind to him, or gentle, and he paid back the world in like. Wholly cynical, he had no regard for man, woman, child, or God. Not at any time he could remember in his thirty-five years of existence had he ever loved anything or anyone. He looked upon women as conveniences that his appetite demanded and, after he had used them, abandoned them or treated them badly." Furthermore, he hates Mouche for "her innocence and essential purity. Capitaine Coq was the mortal enemy of innocence...He would, if he could, have corrupted the whole world."

Peyrot rapes the virgin Mouche and embarks on an abusive relationship with her. "He debauched her at night and then willy-nilly restored her in the daytime through the medium of the love of the seven dolls, so that phoenix-like she arose each day from the ashes of abuse of the night before, whether it was a tongue-lashing, or a beating, or to be used like a woman of the streets. She was rendered each time as soft and dewy-eyed, as innocent and trusting as she had been the night he had first encountered her on the outskirts of Paris. The more cruelly he treated her, the kindlier and more friendly to her were the puppets the next morning. He seemed to have lost all control over them. As for Mouche, she lived in a turmoil of alternating despair and entrancing joy."

In both book and movie, Mouche/Lili is tempted by a superficial attraction to a handsome man—an acrobat named Balotte in the book, the magician Marc in the movie—but returns to the puppeteer. In the movie, Marc's relation with Lili is exploitative. In the book, however, it is Peyrot who is exploitative and abusive and the relationship with Balotte that appears healthy. On their first date, Balotte takes Mouche "solicitiously by the arm, as though she were fragile. It had been so long since a man had been gentle with her that it quite warmed Mouche's heart. All of a sudden she remembered that she was a young girl and laughed happily." When they dance Balotte becomes "ardent" and holds her "close, but yet tenderly. The tenderness found an answering response in Mouche. Youth was wooing youth. For the first time in longer than she could remember, Mouche was enjoying herself in a normal manner."

She intends to leave with Balotte, but ultimately Mouche abandons this "normal" attachment and returns to Peyrot. Gallico says she comes to an understanding of Peyrot as "a man who had tried to be and live a life of evil, who to mock God and man had perpetuated a monstrous joke by creating his puppets like man, in his image and filling them with love and kindness." Mouche "passed in that moment over the last threshold from child to womanhood" and knew "the catalyst that could save him. It was herself." She tells Peyrot "Michel.. I love you. I will never leave you." Peyrot does not respond, but he weeps; Mouche holds his "transfigured" head and, according to Gallico, "knew that they were the tears of a man...who, emerging from the long nightmare, would be made forever whole by love." If this is a happy ending, it is not the simple happy ending of the movie.

Reviewing the book on its publication, Andrea Parke says that Gallico creates "magic... when he writes the sequences with Mouche and the puppets." But "when he writes the love story of Mouche as the ill-treated playing of the puppet master, the story loses its magic. The mawkish realism of the passages has an aura of bathos that is not only unreal but unmoving." One assumes Parke meant plaything of the puppet master not playing. Well Parke whoever she is, has one opinion, another is that the book, the story of Mouche and Peyrot and Golo is throughout as magical as Gallico's Snow Goose, and is indeed, very moving--if you can happen to find this long out of print book.

"The Man Who Hated People" (short story)

"The Man Who Hated People" appeared in the October 28, 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.^[8] It is lighter in tone than other versions of the story; in particular, the abuse heaped by the puppeteer on the innocent "girl" is emotional and verbal; unlike the novel The Love of Seven Dolls, the short story does not even hint at physical or sexual abuse.

The story opens in a New York television studio where Milly, a "sweet-faced girl with [a] slightly harassed expression," is about to make her farewell appearance on the Peter and Panda show.

Peter and Panda are part of an ensemble of puppets; they are a leprechaun and a panda respectively; other puppets include Arthur, a "raffish crocodile;" Mme. Robineau, a French lady "of indeterminate age with dyed hair;" Doctor Henderson, a penguin; and Mr. Tootenheimer, a toymaker. They are all operated by a single puppeteer, named Crake Villeridge. Despite being a puppet show, it has, like the real-life Kukla, Fran and Ollie show, a huge audience of all ages. Also like Kukla, Fran and Ollie, there is no script: "it's all ad-libbed." At the end of the show, "millions watching felt a sense of loss as though a family close to them were breaking up."

Milly has been with the show two years, and, as in other versions of the story, she interacts in a spontaneous and endearing way directly with the personas of the puppets. In a flashback, we learn that during her audition, she had met and talked to the puppets before meeting any human being. Not realizing that this encounter was her audition, she is surprised when a station representative meets her and tells her "Your performance this afternoon came closest to what [Mr. Villeridge] wants." She says "But it actually wasn't a performance" and is told "Exactly. The first time you start giving a performance, you're through."

Villeridge, we learn, is French Canadian, and had once been headed for a serious career as a hockey player. In an accident, two men "skated over the side of his face," ending his hockey career, and seriously and permanently disfiguring him.

She soon learns that Villeridge is emotionally an abuser. She loves the on-air performances, loves the puppets and their personalities, and finds Mr. Tootenheimer, the wise old toymaker, particularly comforting. But she hates Villeridge and what he does to her in rehearsal and after the show. He shouts at her, demeans her, criticizes everything she has done, and humiliates her in front of the program staff. When she meets a nice man named Fred Archer and believes she is "a little in love" with him, she decides she can no longer withstand with Villeridge and his tyrannical ways. She announces that she is marrying Archer and gives notice.

After her farewell show, she changes into her street dress. She waits for everyone else to leave the studio, afraid of encountering Villeridge who "might be waiting for her with one last attack." As she leaves, she hears the voice of Arthur, the puppet, who says "I stayed behind. Milly, take me with you." Soon she is talking to Arthur and the other puppets. Mr. Tootenheimer, the "old philosopher," explains to her that every man is composed of many things, and that the puppets represent aspects of Villeridge's real personality:

And if a man who has been cut and scarred and is ashamed of his appearance, who loved you from the first time his eyes rested upon your face, could be a brutal fool, believing that if you could be made to love all of the things he really was, you would never again recoil from the things he seemed to be.

Millie cries "Crake! Crake! come to me." They embrace, and Milly decides to say goodbye to "the outside world—reality—Fred Archer" and live with Villeridge and his created "Never-Never Land of the mind."

Early smiley emoticon

An early instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face occurred in an ad for Lili in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. (See Emoticon.)

References

1. ^ The screen credits refer only to "a story by Paul Gallico;" Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005 specifically says that it was adapted from "The Man Who Hated People."
2. ^ (2004) The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-32611-4. 
3. ^ Errigo, Angie; Jo Berry (2005). Chick Flicks: Movies Women Love. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.,. ISBN 0-7528-6832-2. 
4. ^ New York Times, Mar 11, 1953, p. 36: "'Lili,' With Leslie Caron, Jean Pierre Aumont, Mel Ferrer, Receives Local Premiere"
5. ^ Walter, Alexander (1997). Audrey. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-18046-2. 
6. ^ Robert L (2002). Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters. Alyson Publishing. ISBN 1-55583-625-9. 
7. ^ puptcrit archive The team of Walton and O'Rourke and their puppets
8. ^ Gallico, Paul (1950), "The Man Who Hated People," The Saturday Evening Post, October 28, 1950, 223(18) p. 22

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