Product Details

• Actors: Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kurt Kasznar
• Directors: Charles Walters
• Writers: Helen Deutsch, Paul Gallico
• Producers: Edwin H. Knopf
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: MGM (Warner)
• VHS Release Date: December 21, 1994
• Run Time: 81 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302148332
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,019 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

The wonderful Leslie Caron stars in this Oscar-winning musical fable with a touch of the bizarre. Caron plays Lili, a recently orphaned waif hopelessly in love with a carnival magician. Mel Ferrer plays Paul, a gruff puppeteer who can express his softer side only through his puppets. Sound weird? It is. Caron's performance is lovely. She is, as always, a graceful dancer, but she is also able to pull off the much more difficult task of making Lili pure and innocent without being icky--she talks to Paul's puppets with complete conviction. (The puppets, by the way, are incredibly creepy.) Younger viewers will take Lili at face value, but adults may well get sucked into its unintentional dark side: homelessness, suicide, emotional repression, and giant dancing puppets all come into play. Also enjoyable is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who does a great job standing around looking pretty as the magician's assistant. --Ali Davis

From the Back Cover

Leslie Caron is radiant as Lili, the shy young orphan who learns the truth about love with the help of a crippled puppeteer. Sweet and elfin singing the lyrical hit "Hi-Lili, Hi-LO," naïve and earnest talking with the puppets, aglow with grace in the ballet dream sequence, Miss Caron makes Lili one of the most enhancing musical fables ever seen on screen.
Based on a Paul Gallico story, the film unfolds in the bright atmosphere of a traveling French carnival. Here Lili becomes a waitress, but she is fired after one night-for spending too much time watching Jean Pierre Aumont, the handsome magician with whom she is infatuated. Lili is grief-stricken until a lame puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) uses his little friends to woo her from her sorrow. Soon she is part of his act, childishly happy with the four puppets, but unable to deal with her moody master, whom she calls "the angry man." How Lili blossoms from adolescence to womanhood with the puppets as her guides makes for a beguiling, bittersweet movie every member of the family will adore!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Lili" a completely enchanting, magical film, March 29, 2000

By	Jim Jr (Buffalo, NY United States) - See all my reviews

"Lili" is one of the most magical and enchanting films ever. It is a small film - not lavish and overblown - but a production that grabs your heart from the very beginning. Leslie Caron has never been better and richly deserved the Academy Award nomination (and should have won). Her scenes with the wonderful puppets (some of the best uses of puppetry in films) are completely enchanting. Mel Ferrer, Jean Pierre Aumont, Kurt Kasner and, surprisingly, Zsa Zsa Gabor couldn't be better. The excellent ballet sequence at the end of the film in which the puppets turn into the puppeteer each time Lili dances with them, showing her that the person behind the characters she has come to love is her real love, is a perfect resolution for the story. "Lili" was the basis for an equally wonderful Broadway musical, "Carnival". This is a film that can be viewed over and over and never lose it's charm and magic.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Give That Girl A Contract, August 28, 2005

By	J. Magin (Ellicott City, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

How hard can it be to find a film with elements of homelessness, unemployment, despair, suicidal thoughts, thievery, feigned affection, disability and self-pity? Not very hard you say. But in a G-rated film barely eighty minutes long?

Still unavailable on DVD format, "Lili" (1953), is available only as a rare "Video Compact Disc" (VCD) which compresses movies onto (at least two) CD-sized disks; i.e., a CD which contains moving pictures and sound. By using an MPEG compression standard, VCDs can hold up to 700 Mb (eighty minutes) of full-motion video and quality stereo sound and can be played on almost all standalone DVD players and PCs. VCD quality is similar to that of VHS tapes.

VCD not withstanding, and barely a decade after "The Wizard of Oz," MGM still made the industry's best-looking films. The sets, costumes and color of "Lili" are outstanding. And at least two things in the film suggest that 1939 classic -- a puppet named "Golo" who resembles Burt Lahr's "Cowardly Lion," and a surreal, yellowish road on which Lili eventually seeks something better.

We first meet Lili (Leslie Caron), an orphaned teenager, at a bakery where a friend of her late father had promised her a job. But he too has died. Homeless and unemployed, she falls in with some traveling circus performers whose act causes her inattentiveness which immediately costs her the job she does get.

Deflated, she climbs a trapeze ladder but is thwarted by the high-pitched voice of "Carrot Top," one of four puppets manned by Paul Berthalet (Mel Ferrer). Paul is overtly bitter that his limp has reduced him from a once-famous dancer to a puppeteer on a French midway. He is particularly aloof towards Lili, except during his puppets' "conversations" with her, planned spontaneities which have become growing nightly attractions at the circus. Through these improvisations with her savior Carrot Top plus a foxy kleptomaniac named Reynardo, a cowardly giant called Golo and the pulchritudinous ballerina, "Margurite," she and Paul can communicate their true feelings as well as introduce the hit song, `Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo" (Best Score Oscar).

Sparring regularly with Paul, "the angry man," she is genuinely hurt when she learns that Marc (Jean-Paul Aumont), a vain womanizing magician, is married to Rosalie, his assistant (Gabor). Marc delights in flaunting Lili's childlike advances, warning her "never come on to a man like that." Marc is either a true heel or is perhaps too absorbed in himself to realize that Lili genuinely loves him.

Although not a musical, the film does contain two wistful ballet dream sequences which showcase Caron's considerable dancing talent. It is thru these musings that she begins to mature as a woman.

When Lili learns that Marc and Rosalie are married and plan to leave the show, she tries to escape until she is joined in her second dream sequence by human versions of the puppets she adores, each of whom becomes Paul as they dance divinely. After all, Marc had recently declared to her, "I am the puppets."

Predictably, it is indeed Paul, the talented but crippled war hero, who is the better choice for Lili who learns for herself, as did Dorothy Gale, that growth can be a painful but ultimately fulfilling journey.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the 3 best films of all time, April 4, 2004

By	Leonard F. Wheat (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Lili" ranks with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" as one of the three finest motion pictures ever filmed. Its captivating song, "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo," ranks with "Over the Rainbow," "When You Wish Upon a Star," "You'll Never Know," and "It's a Grand Night for Singing" as one of the five best original movie songs. Its climactic dream-ballet sequence, in which Lili dances with life-sized versions of four puppets, is rivaled only by the "Out of My Dreams" dream-ballet sequence of "Oklahoma." And no actress has ever been more adorable and endearing--or capable--than Leslie Caron is in this movie.

Not really a musical, Lili is best described as a romantic fable or sophisticated fairy tale. It tells the story of a naive 16-year-old orphan who joins a carnival. There she brings success to a lame puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) by interacting with his four puppets. Her ingenuousness leads her to regard the puppets as real persons. Ferrer, though outwardly bitter about the war injury that ruined his career as an acclaimed dancer, shows flashes of inner kindness and humanity: he uses his puppets at one point to infuse joy into a despondent Lili, and he smiles when she isn't looking. Soon he falls in love with Lili. But she can't recognize as Ferrer's the tenderness that is revealed only in the puppets. Repelled by the overt rudeness of "the angry man," Lili becomes infatuated with the carnival's magician, a ladies' man. When she eventually learns the magician is married, Lili's eyes open. But the puppeteer's jealousy still clouds her vision. She decides to leave the carnival. Her departure precipitates the dream sequence. Here, dancing with the four puppets she has grown to love, she slowly realizes that each character represents a facet of the puppeteer's personality. Gola the giant, for example, is frightened by girls, so he tries to frighten them; but he is actually cowardly, clumsy, longing to be loved. Lili's belated recognition that Gola and the others are really Ferrer brings the story to its heartwarming conclusion.

This imaginative movie is more than a classic. It is pure enchantment. Make it your top priority.