1934 - LILIOM, Fritz Lang fantasy film

If the plot of Liliom seems familiar it's because the story of an irredeemable wife beater (based on a play by Molnar) was also the same source material for Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel.  Guess which version is better.

The director Fritz Lang who specialized in thrillers about criminal masterminds would have seemed the wrong choice for a film like this but he had experience with fantasy subjects with films like Die Nibelungen and The Weary Death.

 

 

Charles Boyer who usually played some sort of continental playboy is the low life carnival barker and he has to make a completely unsympathetic character interesting.  Even when he dies and goes to heaven he still doesn't seem much interested in reforming faced with the prospect of eternal damnation.

The film's best sequence,  Liliom's ascension to heaven was apparently singled out as a distraction from the plot because of the elaborate special effects that Lang used.  Watching it now this seems like an almost ridiculous criticism, the sequence is well done and actually quite restrained.

A good film and not a boring butt busting musical number to be found during the running time.

119 minutes, written by Robert Liebmann and Bernard Zimmer.