Dry Ice Factory

Taking a break from Kathryn Bigelow while I wait for two more DVDs to arrive, I watched another Frank Borzage movie last night, skipping over Song o' My Heart (1930) in the chronological sequence, both because it sounds dull and because I have been very curious to see his version of Liliom. This is based on the Ferenc Molnár play of 1909. It was apparently first adapted to film by Michael Curtiz in 1919 (when he was still working in Hungary -- the play is set in Budapest), but I believe this version is lost. It was also adapted by Fritz Lang in 1934 during his sojourn in France before he headed to America and Hollywood. Then it was adapted as a Broadway musical called Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1945, which was in turn filmed in 1956.

I've never seen the Molnar play, but I've seen Lang's film three times (on two different DVDs), Carousel once on the stage (back in high school) and once in the 1956 film, and now the Borzage film. The story bugs me in all versions, although the story varies somewhat between the versions. There are basically three acts to the story. In the first act a brash carnival barker named Liliom takes up with a meek girl named Julie. They both give up their jobs to be together. In the second act we see that she loves him devotedly despite the fact that he beats her and leeches off her and her aunt. His no-good friend tries to talk him into committing a robbery. In the third act ( SPOILERS below the cut. ) The bottom line in all these stories is that he really does love Julie, despite his abuse of her, and she really does love him. My problem with the story is I find it impossible to sympathize with Julie's love for Liliom, let alone sympathize with Liliom's anger management problem.

However, after a single viewing I may like Borzage's treatment of the story better than Lang's. (Carousel doesn't have much to recommend it, as far as I can tell. It soft pedals Liliom's abusiveness, which takes the teeth out of the story, and the music isn't very interesting to me either.) The story fits very nicely into Borzage's obsession with transcendent love, whereas Lang's obsession with fate is perhaps too grim, even though his Liliom is lighter in tone than most of his other films. Others have remarked that Borzage makes this Julie's story rather than Liliom's. He also treats it as a story of outlaw love -- the two lovers against the restrictions of society; even, in this pre-Code film, living in sin together.

One reason that Borzage may have chosen to focus on Julie is that Charles Farrell is terribly miscast as Liliom. His nasal voice doesn't work very well in the character of a charming brute, which is interesting because he successfully played a similar character in Borzage's great silent film, Seventh Heaven (1927). I found that if I tuned out his voice, his performance as Liliom actually wasn't so bad.



This is true of the movie in general, actually. It suffers from some of the common problems in early sound films. The dialogue frequently sounds stilted and forced. Visually, however, the film is magnificent. It is completely setbound, and the first two acts take place in and around the expressionistic carnival (shades of Caligari) where we first discover Liliom. The whirling rides act as symbols of the whirl and confusion and excitement of life. They are almost always in the background, framing the conversations and confrontations between the characters. The scenes in the afterworld are largely set on trains -- a mixture of miniatures and large-scale fogbound sets, as in the still above. These scenes are utterly enchanting and magical, and there's one shot of a train arriving from nowhere and crashing the frame that is a perfect representation of the story's shift from the natural to the supernatural.

I still find Julie a real drag -- a limp dishrag -- but Borzage finds in her someone who is in love with love. She could have a partnership with the dull but diligent carpenter, who comes to ask her out every week, but she chooses romantic love instead and remains true to it in the face of hard reality. There's a certain beauty in that, I'll admit. It's also true that Liliom has to pay a price for his inability to express his feelings except through violence. But the final line of this movie is just as wrong as it is in Lang's film (and one assumes in Molnár's play). "He hit me but it felt like a kiss." Screw that noise. Maybe Julie has merely convinced herself that it's true, but it always feels to me that the male directors of these films are trying to convince me of it too. It always feels like an apology for male violence against women.

Lucky Star was the third movie that Frank Borzage made with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. In this one, Gaynor does not play a prostitute, but she still shares characteristics with the characters in the first two movies: she is a young woman who is abused and living in deprivation. Here she is a farm girl being worked to death and beaten by a stern mother who is raising a family and running the farm without a husband. (Another thing all three of Gaynor's characters have in common is no father. The other Borzage film I've watched, Lazybones, is about a ne'er-do-well who becomes the ward of another fatherless girl. It gets into uncomfortably incest-like territory, although apparently not intentionally.) Once again Gaynor is redeemed by the true love of a good man. This time she has to be saved from a cad who has charmed her mother, in fact.

Farrell's characters vary more from film to film. Here he is a WWI veteran who is paralyzed from the waist down and thus in doubt of his own manhood. It still seems to me that the first of the three films, Seventh Heaven (1927), is the strongest because Farrell's character is also redeemed by love. On the other hand, his wounded character in Lucky Star is redeemed in a different way, so I'm not sure this analysis holds up. It's just that his character is so noble from the get-go that he is not morally redeemed, which seems initially less interesting.

Gaynor's naive, spunky, curious farm girl is the main attraction, at least as far as the characters go. Borzage is able to portray innocence very powerfully. The other two movies are set in cities (Paris and Naples, respectively), but the hard work of farm life is vividly captured here. I'm not sure what it is, but Borzage's stories are fascinating in their unfurling. They are so simple, but he is able to find the deep feeling in the smallest of gestures. All three of these movies are about the birth and blooming of true love, and Borzage has a delicate feel for the fragility and resilient beauty of it. There is an incredible erotic charge lurking beneath the innocent surface that's very different from, say, Cecil B. DeMille's more lurid, knowing approach.

This is a visually magnificent film. Coming at it from the perspective of Murnau's influence (which this collection obviously encourages), you see the canted angles and the luscious shadows and detailed chiaroscuro. One scene gets darker and darker until all you can see is dim silver highlights on Farrell's face. Seventh Heaven and Street Angel may have had more arresting tracking shots, but everything here is framed to perfection, creating a pocket universe no matter whether we are looking at the farmhouse (as in the still above) or at Gaynor's glowing face.