Children believe what we tell them ✵ La Belle et la Bête - A GOLDEN AGE IN BLACK AND WHITE ✵ 1931–1949 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

French fantasy

DIRECTOR

Jean Cocteau

WRITER

Jean Cocteau

STARS

Jean Marais, Josette Day

BEFORE

1902 Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon is an early special-effects fantasy movie.

1930 The Blood of a Poet, Cocteau’s first movie, explores the power of visual metaphors.

1933 King Kong portrays a sympathetic relationship between a beast and a girl.

AFTER

1950 Orphée is the second of Cocteau’s movies about the Greek legend of Orpheus.

1991 Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is one of the company’s most successful movies.

For some critics, Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) is one of the most poetic movies ever made. It is the story of a young girl (Josette Day) trapped in the palace of a beastly creature (Jean Marais). Though repelled by the beast at first, the girl can see the goodness within him and falls in love with him. Cocteau tells the tale with such serious honesty that it is elevated from bedtime story into something morally profound.

For almost 40 years before he made La Belle et la Bête, Cocteau was a poet, and poetry had been the theme of his first, 55-minute experimental movie in 1930, The Blood of a Poet, about the mythical poet Orpheus. Cocteau was eager to deny that there was any symbolism in La Belle et la Bête, which was his first full-length feature movie, although he also believed that poetry was an unconscious process. Contemporary US critic Bosley Crowther was struck by the movie’s “gorgeous visual metaphors.” At the same time, it is striking how plainly the story is told.

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On the movie’s release, critics praised its exquisite and imaginative costumes, designed by Christian Bérard.

Supernatural simplicity

Tellingly, the movie opens not with the story, but with Cocteau writing on a school blackboard. He is making it clear that this is a story with a moral lesson, not a fantasy to be indulged in. “Children believe what we tell them,” he writes.

The Beast’s palace is more like a stage set than a fantasy world. The magic in the palace is surreal, rather than fantastic. Real hands and arms emerge from walls and tables to hold candles and pour drinks, and caryatids have real human faces that roll their eyes and blow smoke. It is reminiscent of the art of Salvador Dalí, rather than the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm—unsettling, but also more adult and more moving. With settings inspired by the engravings of Gustave Doré and paintings of Jan Vermeer, and exteriors shot at Château de la Roche Courbon and Raray in France, cinematographer Henri Alekan created a world of Gothic enchantment. Cocteau himself credited Alekan for achieving “a supernatural quality within the limits of realism.”

"The secret to it all is that Cocteau set out to make a movie that would stir adults; along the way he discovered the child’s imagination, too."

David Thomson
Have You Seen…?, 2008

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Fainting at the sight of the Beast, Beauty is carried to her bed chamber. He tells her that he will ask her to marry him every day that they are together.

JEAN COCTEAU Director

Writer, artist, and director Jean Cocteau was born in 1889, near Paris. He published his first book of poetry when he was 19, which gave him an entrée to the literary and artistic avant-garde in Paris.

In 1917, Cocteau wrote Parade, the story for a ballet composed by Erik Satie for the Ballets Russes. His most famous novel was Les Enfants Terribles (1929). Cocteau directed his first short movie in 1930, about the mythical ancient Greek poet Orpheus, but it was not until 1946, at the age of 57, that he made his first full-length movie, La Belle et la Bête. Four years later, he made a second movie about Orpheus, Orphée. He combined movies, poetry, and theater until his death, in 1963.

Key movies

1930 The Blood of a Poet

1946 La Belle et la Bête

1950 Orphée

1962 The Testament of Orpheus

What else to watch: A Trip to the Moon (1902) ✵ King Kong (1933) ✵ Vasilissa the Beautiful (1939) ✵ The Red Shoes (1948) ✵ The Night of the Hunter (1955)