LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE

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(Beauty and the Beast)

France, 1946

Director: Jean Cocteau

Production: Black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes (90 minutes according to some sources). Released 29 October 1946, Paris. Filmed in Saint-Maurice studios; exteriors shot at Rochecorbon in Touraine.

Producer: André Paulvé; screenplay: Jean Cocteau, from the fairy tale of Jean Marie Leprince de Beaumont; photography: Henri Alekan; editor: Claude Iberia; sound engineer: Jean Lebreton; sound effects: Rouzenat; production designers: René Moulaert and Lucien Carré; art director: Roger Desormière; costume designer: Christian Bérard, executed by Escoffier and Castillo from the House of Paquin; technical assistant to Cocteau: René Clément.

Cast: Jean Marais (The Beast and The Prince); Josette Day (Beauty); Marcel André (The Father); Mila Parély (Félicie); Nane Germon (Adélaïde); Michel Auclair (Ludovic); Raoul Marco (The Usurer); Gilles Watteaux and Noel Blin.

Publications

Script:

Jean Cocteau: 3 Screenplays (The Eternal Return, Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus), New York, 1972.

Cocteau, Jean, "La Belle et la bete," in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris) July-September 1973.

Books:

Cocteau, Jean, La Belle et la bête: Journal d'un film, Paris, 1946; as Diary of a Film, New York, 1950.

Crosland, Margaret, Jean Cocteau, London, 1956.

Kihm, Jean-Jacques, Cocteau, Paris, 1956.

Pillaudin, Roger, Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film, Paris, 1960.

Fraigneau, André, Cocteau, New York, 1961.

Fowlie, Wallace, Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet's Age, Bloomington, Indiana, 1968.

Sprigge, Elizabeth, and Jean-Jacques Kihm, Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror, New York, 1968.

Lannes, Roger, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1968.

Gilson, René, Cocteau, New York, 1969.

Cocteau, Jean, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography, edited by Robert Phelps, New York, 1970.

Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau, Boston, 1970.

Knapp, Bettina, Cocteau, New York, 1970.

Anderson, Alexandra and Carol Saltus, editors, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, New York, 1984.

de Miomandre, Philippe, Moi, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1985.

Keller, Marjorie, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1986.

Peters, Arthur King, Jean Cocteau and his World: An Illustrated Biography, London, 1987.

Articles:

Bazin, André, in Le Parisien Liberé, 11 January, 1946.

Variety (New York), 24 December 1947.

Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1972.

"La Belle et la bête: La critique," in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-September 1973.

American Image (Detroit), no. 2, 1976.

Bonnet, J. C., in Cinématographe (Paris), April-May 1976.

Wilson Jr., R. A., in Audience (Hollywood), November 1976.

Gow, Gordon, "Astonishment: Magic Films from Jean Cocteau," in Films and Filming (London), January, 1978.

Popkin, M., "Cocteau's Beaty and the Beast: The Poet as Monster," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 10, no. 2, 1982.

Galef, D., "A Sense of Magic: Reality and Illusion in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1984.

Smith, Malcolm, in Starburst (London), November 1985.

Garofalo, M., "Once Upon a Time. . . ," in Segnocinema (Vincenza, Italy), May-June 1992.

Mousselard, Oliver-Pascal, "Le bête et sa belle changent d'air," in Télérama, no. 2353, 15 February 1995.

Erb, C., "Another World or the World of an Other?: The Space of Romance in Recent Versions of Beauty and the Beast," in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), vol. 34, no. 4, 1995.

Lansing Smith, Evans, "Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau, and Bergman," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 24, no. 3, 1996.

Turner, George, "Once Upon a Time There Was Beauty and the Beast," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 78, no. 9, September 1997.

Greene, N., "Jean Cocteau: A Cinema of Baroque Unease," and A.S. Levitt, "The Cinematic Magic of Jean Cocteau," in Bucknell Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997.

* * *

La Belle et la bête, the film which marked Jean Cocteau's return to directing after an interval of 15 years, is a work which continues the vein of fantasy which had characterised his scriptwriting during the wartime years. To this extent the film is typical of its period, for the early postwar years in France saw a basic continuity with approaches established during the Vichy period (there was no resurgence of realism in France to compare with the emergence of neorealism in Italy). But in all other ways the appropriation of a fairy tale to the filmmaker's own personal mythology is a totally individual work.

The film is based on the tale as told by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, but there is little evidence in Cocteau's approach of the childlike innocence which the director demands of his audience in his brief introduction to the film. Visually, the film is one of Cocteau's most sophisticated works. The costumes designed by Christian Bérard and the lighting and framing devised by Henri Alekan are decorative rather than functional and take their inspiration from classic Dutch painting, particularly the work of Vermeer. Despite the presence of René Clément as technical supervisor, the film shows none of the reliance on complexity of scripting and use of heavy irony so characteristic of French cinema in the late 1940s. The legend is handled in a dazzingly eclectic style. The home life of Belle's family is parodied and often broadly farcial in tone, as, for instance, in the use of cackling ducks to comment on the attitudes of her sisters. By contrast, the departure of Belle for the Beast's castle and her entry there are totally stylised, with Cocteau employing slow motion photography to obtain a dreamlike effect.

La Belle et la bête is an excellent example of Cocteau's continual concern in his film work to provide a "realism of the unreal." The fairytale world of Beast's castle is given great solidity, and indeed it is arguable that the setting has been given too much weight, with the result that there is a degree of ponderousness about the film which Georges Auric's music serves only to emphasise. In evoking the magical qualities of the castle, Cocteau has made surprisingly little use of the film's trick shot potentialities which form so crucial a part of so many of his other works. Here the living faces of the statuary and the disembodied human arms that act as Beast's servants are essentially theatrical devices.

One of the great difficulties facing Cocteau was that of sustaining interest for 90 minutes in the oversimplified and largely unpersonalised characters of his source material. The solution found for the minor characters is caricature and humour. For the Beast, Cocteau and Bérard use the make-up of Jean Marais to emphasise his bestial nature, a strategy which is particularly effective in such scenes as those in which he drinks or scents game. Belle is by comparison a fairly dull figure, despite Josette Day's beauty, but the ambiguities of her attitude toward the Beast do add interest and complexity to the character. The double use of Jean Marais as both the Beast and Belle's dissolute lover avoids the danger of too easy an explanation of the film's symbolism, and the transformation into a princely figure at the end shows a characteristically lyrical approach to death on the filmmaker's part. Particularly when seen in conjunction with the intimate diary of the shooting which Cocteau published in 1946 to coincide with the release of the film, La Belle et la bête provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the screen's subtlest and most evocative poets.

—Roy Armes