I hope this headline attracts a lot of Disney fans. Much as a I love “Beauty and the Beast” from 1991, Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a French film from 1946, is equally as magical, enchanting and lovely as the beloved cartoon.
Cocteau’s film isn’t precisely a kids movie, although based on a children’s fable and certainly easy enough and fantastical enough to be enjoyed by one. It tells the story of which we are now all very much familiar but makes the film wondrous in its employment of trick film shots, special effects, extravagant costumes and more.
The Beast himself (Jean Marais) is a silly but certainly busy looking costume of fur and hair, and within his cursed castle is one of the strangest yet most appealing movie sets in history. Lining the walls are protruding arms holding candelabras, statues that open their eyes and follow the intruders and dark voids leading to stairs that seem to make no spatial sense. Today, the special effects are decidedly cheesy, clearly being nothing more than people sticking their hands through to another side of a set wall, but it’s impossible to care because the film is handled with such poetic grace and beauty in its glowing lighting and shimmering black and white cinematography.
There’s an elegantly done scene where Belle (Josette Day) first enters the Beast’s castle and runs through the enchanted place in slow motion and then literally glides as she floats past heavenly white curtains blowing in through the windows. And nearly the whole film is told with this grace and haunting beauty.
Cocteau was a multi-talented director in his day, also being famous for poetry, surrealist paintings, novels and plays. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies piece about this film that unlike his first film, “Blood of a Poet,” which was “an art film made by a poet,” “‘Beauty and the Beast’ was a poetic film made by an artist.” It’s the reason the film seems so touching today as it explores themes like love and grief, and even a few common to Ancient Greek Tragedy, such as loyalty to a God versus loyalty to family. Cocteau even dabbled in Greek Mythology with his Orphic trilogy.
The fantasy scenes are certainly more magical than the real world scenes, most of which involve Belle’s two sisters (who reminded me more of characters from “Cinderella” than “Beauty and the Beast”), who spend all their time being petty and generally awful. And the end is a cornball moment as well, but there are wondrous cinematic tricks and touches that still make this film a marvel.