Lili
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Lili is a musical film which opened in March, 1953. Considered one among many "classic MGM musicals," 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.
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Lili (the movie)
The movie was based on a story by Paul Gallico, considerably adapted by Helen Deutsch, and was later made into a stage musical, Carnival! starring Anna Maria Alberghetti.
It won the Academy Award for Original Music Score and was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Leslie Caron), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color, Best Cinematography, Color, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay.
Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer's rendition of "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo" was released as a record, and became a minor hit, reaching a respectable #30 on 1953's charts.
Bosley Crowther, reviewing the movie at it 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 showers other encomia on Caron, calling "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 reomance with clarity, humor, and lack of guile," and admires the choreographer, sets, music, and title song.
The movie is not universally liked, though; Paulene Kael called it a "sickly whimsy" and refer to Mel Ferrer's "narcissistic, masochistic smiles."
Since the puppets are almost Caron's co-stars, it is odd that few reviews of the film even mention puppeteers Walton and O'Rourke, famous in puppeteering circles. They mostly did cabaret work, did not appear on television, and Lili is the only known filmed record of their work. For the film, Walton and O'Rourke made the puppets; George Latshaw manipulated Carrot Top; Wolo manipulated Golo the Giant; and Walton and O'Rourke manipulated Marguerite and Reynardo.
Story summary
Lili, rendered homeless by circumstances, contemplates suicide and is dissuaded by the friendly intervention of four puppets in a carnival puppet theatre. In her naïve simplicity, she relates directly to the puppets, seemingly unaware of the existence of a puppeteer. She becomes a part of the show. Her simple, direct interaction with the puppets, and their improvised responses in return, are a great success with audiences.
The puppeteer, played by Mel Ferrer, is gruff and emotionally cold. He falls in love with Lili, but can express his feelings only through the puppets. His situation is complicated by Lili's infatuation with a handsome magician in the carnival, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, who (it is implied) seduces Lili. In a dream-ballet sequence, Lili competes with the magician's sophisticated and attractive assistant, played by Zsa Zsa Gabor. The puppeteer's genial assistant and friend, played by Kurt Kasznar, helps the puppeteer accept and deal with his own feelings.
When Lili discovers that the magician has only been toying with her and is actually married to his assistant, Lili leaves the carnival. On the road out of town, she falls asleep and, in a dream, dances with each of the puppets she loves, now enlarged to human scale. To her shock, each one dissolves into the figure of the puppeteer and fades. Realizing finally that her bond with the puppets is really a bond with the puppeteer, she runs back to the carnival and to a happy ending.
Love of Seven Dolls (the book)
The Paul Gallico story from which Lili and Carnival! were adapted was published in book form in 1954 as Love of Seven Dolls. 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." (Other sources concur in calling Lili an adaptation of this book. However, the movie credits refer only an unspecified "story by Paul Gallico," while descriptions of Carnival! state that it is based on a Gallico story entitled "The Seven Souls of Clement O'Reilly." The book itself does not mention any prior magazine versions).
Helen Deutsch's adaptation is 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. The magician's assistant is a "primitive" Senegalese man named Golo, rather than the movie's amiable Frenchman. 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 culd 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 Lili 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 reciprocate, 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."
Early smiley
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
- New York Times, Mar 11, 1953, p. 36: "'Lili,' With Leslie Caron, Jean Pierre Aumont, Mel Ferrer, Receives Local Premiere"
- puptcrit archive (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive1.pl?list=puptcrit.archive/puptcrit_1998/puptcrit.9805) The team of Walton and O'Rourke and their puppets