"Even in heaven, there's only justice - nothing but justice," wails Liliom, a bad husband and bad criminal who kills himself after a botched robbery, only to float up into a DMV-office heaven peopled with fat, disheveled angels wearing store-bought wings. The angels give him a number and tell him to get in line along with all the other deadbeats. Soon enough he will get his turn before the bar of justice. When his number is finally called and the head angel begins to interrogate him about his bad behavior while on Earth (he was a chronic woman-slapper, for starters), Liliom puffs out his chest and declares that heaven must accept him for who he is, on his own terms.


Fritz Lang's Liliom was released in 1934, barely a year after a meeting in Joseph Goebbel's office caused him to pack his bags and leave Germany behind for good, he probably thought. During a brief stopover in France, on his way to America, Lang directed this fantasy-comedy that imagines a heaven even more laughably unjust than Earth. It's a rather cheap film with a leitmotif that consists of obvious, Ed Woodian artificiality - unmatched wigs sitting on heads, sets that look like they could be carried off as soon as the camera stopped rolling - nothing you see on screen is meant to seem grounded in reality. But the care with which its made is not cheap at all; it's the film that Fritz Lang reportedly thought was his best.

Liliom is a muscle-bound drifter who gets by on the charity of women who salivate over his pungent masculinity. When the film opens he is working as a carnival barker, teasing and entertaining young ladies and stringing along the carnival's older female proprietor on a leash. Enchanted by a quiet, beautiful young lady named Julie (Madeleine Ozeray), he gives up the freewheeling carnie life for a domesticity he is laughably unprepared for. He is soon compelled to participate in a stupid hold-up job, and he fails at that as well and stabs himself out of sheer frustration. Liliom is soon 'defending his life' in front of unsympathetic angels who make him watch clips of his old ife on a movie screen, and then ultimately agree to give him a chance to make things right.

At first glance you may find the comedy of Liliom to be obvious and hokey, but it's best viewed as a companion piece to Lang's 1931 masterpiece M, in which the criminal world and the law-abiding world team up to hunt down a solitary, hapless murderer. In both films, a monstrous fate is ineludible for the hero, and all because of his nature, which he is helpless to change. The movie also has heavy similarities with the work of Renoir, La Bete Humaine in particular. Lang and Renoir were both sympathetic to fools and obsessed with the idea of people sinking to their natural levels. Both were also deeply skeptical of the idea of a nurturing heaven. When the interrogating angel tries to question Liliom about his shameful ways, Liliom responds by saying "Listen, since I'm dead I'd like to at least reap the benefits. Stop bothering me with these accusations."

Liliom's eventual return trip to Earth is so loopy that it has to be seen to be believed. It puts Metropolis completely to shame in its detached, Brechtian insanity. Lang cuts back and forth between an Earthbound Liliom attempting to contact his daughter sixteen years in the future (the daughter is also played by Madeleine Ozeray) and a fat man covered in black body paint and wearing half of a bear suit, stacking giant cinder blocks on a scale of justice. God only knows what kind of Teutonic God of the underworld he's supposed to represent, but I'm sure the answer is buried somewhere in German lore. Uberbearensuiten, maybe. Every time Liliom makes another social faux paux, the bear man adds another block onto the scale and giggles triumphantly

When Liliom accosts his daughter and she tries to shoo him away, thinking he's a street urchin, he loses his temper and slaps her, ending his visit to Earth suddenly. It's back to heaven, and more apologizing. On Earth, the daughter runs home and sobs to her mother (Liliom's widow) Julie, telling her that she has just been slapped, which causes a flood of emotion in Julie as she remembers Liliom and the good old days when he used to slap her silly. She keeps a picture of Liliom nearby, strutting like a peacock with his hands on his hips. Then comes the following exchange, which has to be heard to be believed:


Daughter: Mother, did anyone ever hit you? I mean a real slap that you can hear ring, and yet you don't feel a thing.

Julie: Yes, my child. There was a time someone hit me, but I didn't feel a thing.

Daughter: Then it's possible for someone to hit you and not hurt you at all.

Julie: (tears rolling down her face) Yes, my child. Someone can beat you without hurting you at all.


Liliom has to rank among the most hilarious pro-working class movies to ever come out of Europe. It demands that the lower orders be accepted with all of their faults and dares to turn virtue itself - even religious virtue - upside down, by exposing it as a power structure designed to keep certain people away from the good life. It's no wonder the film was completely denied a release in the United States in 1934, and caused demonstrations where it played in France. After all, we can't have the masses thinking that drunkeness, laziness and a violent temper are virtues, can we?