On May 14, 2010, at 9:13 AM, Jansy wrote: Yesterday I watched a "bizarre fable", dated 1953: "Lili" directed by Charles Walters, with Mel Ferrer and Leslie Caron. (written by Helen Deutsch and Paul Gallico), a puppeteer's various puppets representing various facets of his own personality.
Helen Deutsch (one of the script-writers) has apparently split Dr. Samuel Johnson into "body" and "mystery" (perhaps, as I'm now suggesting, that we could proceed with fictional John Shade himself - but I haven't yet read her 2005 "Loving Dr. Johnson").
Dear Jansy,
Although I can't see any connection even remotely to Pale Fire, since you brought up Lili, the movie and the story by Paul Gallico on which it was based, they and their other incarnation, the musical Carnival! are all old favorites of mine.
The original story by Paul Gallico, "Love for Seven Dolls" is much darker, especially sexually, than the film. Rather as if Lolita were made into a film portraying Humbert Humbert as Lolita's "Mon Oncle." The Gallico is much more explicitely brutal than Lolita, by the way.
But the film does have that lovely song "High Lily, High Lo" by Bronislaw Kaper that I have loved since I first heard it in infancy. Helene Deutsch wrote the screenplays for several films that were made into films by MGM in those early fifties, including another musical with Leslie Caron starring as Cinderella - - the film is called The Glass Slipper, which just misses being nabokovian I guess. Another stunning melody by Bronislaw Kaper, too. You will be pleased (or not) to know that Helene Deutsch was a Freudian and brought a psychoanalytic touch to her interpretations of the two stories, but with a delightful sense of humor that even our old humbug might have appreciated.
Carolyn Kunin