Lili (MGM, copyrighted 1952, released 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Taxi my husband Charles and I switched to Turner Classic Movies for a quite different sort of film: Lili, a 1953 MGM semi-musical (it has one famous song and two spectacular dance scenes) starring Leslie Caron as Lili Daurier, a naïve 16-year-old girl whose innocence approaches mental disability. It takes place in France immediately after one of the world wars – though it’s not altogether clear which one. At least we know it’s in the 20th century, because the carnival Lili attaches herself to moves on mechanical wheels instead of being horse-drawn. But we don’t see enough cars to tell whether this is the aftermath of World War I or World War II. Lili began life as a short story by Paul Gallico called “The Man Who Hated People,” published in the October 28, 1950 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, and it was turned into a screenplay by Helen Deutsch, the woman whose rewrites ruined Douglas Sirk’s film noir Shockproof (1948) after Sirk had accepted the original script by Sam Fuller. Fortunately Deutsch’s sensibility was far more attuned to romantic melodrama than film noir. Lili shows up in a small French town just after the death of her father. She’s looking for the local baker because dad told her on his deathbed that he would take her in, but when she arrives at the bakery she’s told that the baker is dead, too. A neighbor who runs a notions store offers to give her food and a place to stay, but it turns out he’s only interested in lecherously having his way with her, so she flees. Fortunately, Lili runs into Marco the Magnificent (Jean-Pierre Aumont), a magician with a traveling carnival that just happens to be performing in that town. Marco offers to give her a place to stay in one of the carnival wagons and Lili forms a crush on him, but he’s already paired up with his assistant in the act, Rosalie (Zsa Zsa Gabor, who fortunately is given almost no dialogue in this movie and thereby can’t wreck it like she did in so many of her other films, including John Huston’s otherwise great Moulin Rouge). Lili earns herself a job with the carnival by talking back to the puppets run by Marco’s friend Paul Berthalet (Mel Ferrer), and though she does so at first only for her own amusement her contribution becomes such a hit with audiences that Paul hires her to do that every night.

Paul was formerly a ballet dancer until he was injured in World War Whichever, resulting in a permanently damaged leg. There are two big dance sequences representing Lili’s dreams; in one of them she uses Marco’s magic cloak to make Rosalie disappear, and the other is a big dance between Lili and Paul’s four puppets, now grown to full human size and played by dancers, that looked so much like a scene from The Wizard of Oz I joked, “All you have to do is follow the yellow brick road.” Paul appears in that final scene along with his puppets, and as he dances with each one in turn it disappears and this makes Lili realize that she’s really in love with Paul. At the end Lili, Paul, Marco and Rosalie are all offered jobs with the “Folies de Paris,” represented by two rather creepy-looking guys, and Marco’s comic-relief sidekick Jacquot (Kurt Kasznar) goes along with them. I might have liked Lili better if it weren’t such a wrenching change of pace from Taxi; its whimsy struck a cord with movie audiences in 1953 and it was MGM’s most successful musical of that year (though I think The Band Wagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli and co-starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green that not only addressed the age difference between the leads but made it a major plot point, is much better). Eight years later it got turned into a Broadway stage musical called Carnival! wth Anna Maria Alberghetti in Caron’s role and Jerry Orbach (of all people!) in Ferrer’s. Its big theme song, “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo,” composed by Bronislaw Kaper with lyrics by Helen Deutsch, was a hit for Dinah Shore. The film got several Academy Award nominations, including Leslie Caron for Best Actress; she lost to Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday and also lost her leading man, Mel Ferrer, to Hepburn when the two got married for real on September 25, 1954 shortly after Lili was released. But Caron did take a part from Hepburn when she got the title role in the 1958 film Gigi, after Hepburn had played the part on the Broadway stage. Ironically, Hepburn controversially took the role of Eliza Doolittle in another Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical, My Fair Lady, from Julie Andrews when the show was filmed in 1964, so with regard to Lerner-Loewe musical projects Hepburn’s record was “you win one, you lose one.”