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

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Romantic drama

DIRECTOR

Marcel Carné

WRITER

Jacques Prévert

STARS

Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand, Louis Salou

BEFORE

1939 US historical romance Gone with the Wind is released.

1942 Set in 1485, The Night Visitors is the first movie made during World War II by Carné and Prévert with Arletty.

AFTER

1946 Carné and Prévert reunite to make Gates of the Night, but it is a flop and they never work together again.

Among the many great landmarks of French cinema, Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), made at the height of the German occupation in 1943 and 1944, is now seen as among the very greatest. With a compelling script by the poet Jacques Prévert, director Marcel Carné turned a story set in 1830s Paris about four different men’s love for the enigmatic courtesan Garance into a profound and romantic drama.

The movie itself is glorious. But what makes the achievement of Carné and Prévert all the more extraordinary is the degree of difficulty they overcame even making it in occupied France. Practically, materials for sets and costumes were almost nonexistent: fruit and loaves of bread intended to be used on camera were eaten by half-starved crew members. Under the eye of the Nazis and the Vichy French regime, every move was monitored. And yet Carné’s invention—and independence—triumphed.

"A film poem on the nature and varieties of love—sacred and profane, selfless and possessive."

Pauline Kael
5001 Nights at the Movies, 1982

Shooting in Vichy France

The ambition and scale of the movie required a large cast and production team. The cast included Nazi collaborators, whom the producers had been coerced into hiring. But what the Vichy overseers didn’t know was that Carné had found a place for Resistance fighters among the 1,800 extras, using the movie as daytime cover for their clandestine heroism. The production team also included Jews in hiding, whose identities were kept secret—in particular designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma. Trauner lived with Carné during filming under an assumed name, while Kosma’s work was credited to Maurice Thiriet, who arranged the music for orchestra.

The mime sequences were developed by Jean-Louis Barrault (who plays Baptiste, left), and his teacher, Étienne Decroux (who plays Baptiste’s father).

Boulevard du Crime

There were endless logistical headaches assembling the movie’s gigantic set, which Carné built in Nice, in southern France. It was 1,300 ft (400 m) long, and while building materials were scarce, he somehow recreated a street that resembled the famous Boulevard du Temple in Paris during the early 19th century. The street was nicknamed the Boulevard du Crime for the crime melodramas popular in its lowbrow theaters. At one point during the shoot, when an Allied invasion of southern France was expected, the production was forced to abandon Nice and move to Paris, only to find on their return that the set had been ruined by storms. It had to be completely rebuilt.

Despite these problems, Carné and his team succeeded in creating a lavish and technically brilliant movie, and in coaxing unforgettable performances from the cast. The star, Arletty, oozes sexual allure in her portrayal of Garance, entrancing the four men who are competing for her love.

“I’d spill torrents of blood to give you a river of diamonds.”

Pierre François Lacenaire / Children of Paradise

Historical suitors

Three of these suitors are based on real historical figures: Jean-Louis Barrault plays the mime artist Baptiste Deburau, who transformed the role of Pierrot into a poignant, childlike character; Pierre Brasseur plays the actor Frédérick Lemaître; and Marcel Herrand the suave criminal Pierre François Lacenaire. The fourth character, the cynical aristocrat Édouard de Montray, played by Louis Salou, was inspired by Charles Auguste, Duc de Morny, half brother of Napoleon III.

The movie opened in liberated Paris in 1945, and proved such a success that it played for more than a year. It was credited with helping to restore French national pride.

The world’s a stage

From the outset, the movie blurs the line between the stage and real life. Everything is about the theatrical show of life. Even the title of the movie refers to the highest balcony in the theater, known as “paradise” (in Britain they call it “the gods”), where the cheapest seats in the house are situated. The Boulevard du Crime itself seems like a stage, jostled through and caroused on by a vast and rowdy army of colorful figures, courtiers, and lowlifes alike. The movie opens with a theater curtain that parts as the camera glides down a Boulevard du Crime crowded with extras, and enters a carnival display where another curtain labeled “The Naked Truth” opens to reveal Garance bathing in a barrel of water, visible only from the shoulders up, and staring at her reflection in a mirror.

Rejected by Garance, Baptiste marries Nathalie, played by Maria Casares, an exiled Spanish Republican associated with the Resistance.

“Jealousy belongs to all if a woman belongs to no one.”

Frédérick Lamaître / Children of Paradise

Elusive love

Garance becomes involved with each of her suitors in turn: first with Baptiste, the mime, who saves her from a false charge of theft; then with Frédérick, who steps in confidently after Baptiste realizes that Garance can’t return his love; thirdly, with the criminal Lacenaire; and finally, de Montray, who offers Garance protection when she is drawn unwittingly into Lacenaire’s crimes.

Garance is briefly intrigued by all four men, bestowing her affection on each of them in her own way, yet she remains utterly elusive, and cannot love them in the way that they dote upon her. In the first half of the story, as each receives some measure of attention from her, the men are content, but, as the movie progresses, her hold over each of them changes their lives.

"To be a producer, one must be a gambler, and the greatest French producers were gamblers."

Marcel Carné

Ultimate disappointment

In the movie’s second half, the suitors’ dissatisfaction breeds resentment. Frédérick achieves his dream of playing Othello since at last he understands the pain of jealousy. For Lacenaire, the story ends in tragedy as he dies on the scaffold for killing de Montray. For Garance, too, there is no happy resolution: the man she finally sets her heart upon—Baptiste—is ultimately out of her reach.

Much of this drama unfolds before the eyes of the “children of paradise,” the working-class audience in the cheap seats. They are the most boisterous characters in the story—like the cinema audience, furthest from the stage yet also the most demanding. The paradise crowd cries out for entertainment. They are eager to see suffering and pain. As Baptiste’s father says, “A kick in the rear, if well delivered, is a sure laugh.” They want novelty, too. But “novelty,” he says, “is as old as the hills.”

Baptiste’s father plays for laughs from the “children of paradise,” even as Baptiste reinvents the role of Pierrot as a childlike, disappointed lover, whose pain tugs at the audience’s heartstrings.

"Cinema and poetry are the same thing, Prévert said. Not always, alas. But it’s surely true here."

Derek Malcolm
The Guardian, 1999

Born in Paris in 1906, Marcel Carné began his movie career as a critic, while working in his spare time as a cameraman on silent movies. By 1931, he was directing his own short movies. In 1936, Carné teamed up with surrealist poet Jacques Prévert for the first time on the movie Jenny. Over the next decade, the pair made a series of “poetic realist” movies, casting a fatalistic eye over the lives of characters on the margins of society, which established Carné as a star in French cinema.

In the 1950s, Carné’s reputation was eclipsed as the younger generation of the French New Wave demanded a less artificial style. However, he remained in high regard among his fellow directors, and François Truffaut once said that he “would give up all my movies to have directed Children of Paradise.” Carné continued to make movies into the 1970s. He died in 1996.

1938 Hôtel du Nord

1942 Night Visitors

1945 Children of Paradise

1946 Gates of the Night

What else to watch: Le jour se lève (1939) ✵ Gone with the Wind (1939) ✵ Le Colonel Chabert (1943) ✵ Phantom of the Opera (1943) ✵ An American in Paris (1951) ✵ The Last Metro (1980)