Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse

Cast: Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Anderson, Jeremy Burnham, Eveline Eyfel. Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on a novel by Françoise Sagan. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: Georges Auric. 

Only a couple of years after Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse was released to critical and box office indifference, filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni would make their international reputations with films about moneyed Europeans fighting vainly the old ennui. In fact, Bonjour Tristesse is not so very much different in content from movies like Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, both of which rocketed to success in 1960. They're all about what today we might call "Eurotrash" -- people with too much money and not enough to occupy their souls. Preminger's film was hindered a bit by the censors, who forbade any explicit descriptions of what was going on between Raymond (David Niven) and his several mistresses, much less any extrapolation about his exceptionally close relationship with his daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg). And the casting of the British Niven and Deborah Kerr and the American Jean Seberg as characters meant to be très French, feels more than a little off-base. There's also some heavy-handed telegraphing of the film's message, summed up in a title song by composer Georges Auric with lyrics by screenwriter Arthur Laurents that's sung by Juliette Gréco in a Paris boîte. But Bonjour Tristesse has gained in favor over the years, no longer dismissed as a complete misfire. Mylène Demongeot adds some much needed comic relief in the form of Elsa, Raymond's sunburned mistress, a necessary counterpoint to Cecile's existential angst. Auric's score provides a continental flavor to the film, and Georges Périnal's cinematography makes the most of locations, especially the Paris that's viewed in monochrome as contrasted with the Technicolor vividness of the Riviera. Since the film is told from the point of view of Seberg's Cecile, the place where she feels depressed and regretful is necessarily more drab than the place where she had a brief encounter with something like freedom and power. It's Paris as Kansas and the Riviera as Oz, but without the "no place like home" nostalgia. 

Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Jean Marais in Orphée

Orphée: Jean Marais
Heurtebise: François Périer
The Princess: María Casares
Eurydice: Marie Déa
The Editor: Henri Crémieux
Aglaonice: Juliette Gréco
The Poet: Roger Blin
Jacques Cégeste: Édouard Dermithe

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer
Production design: Jean d'Eaubonne
Film editing: Jacqueline Sadoul
Music: Georges Auric

Though it's not as sumptuous as his Beauty and the Beast (1946), Jean Cocteau's Orphée seems to me in some ways the more beautiful film. It embraces ugliness as a foil for beauty in ways that the earlier film doesn't. (As many have noted, the Beast of Cocteau's film is too beautiful a creature to inspire the disgust he presumably was doomed to evoke.) In Orphée the ugliness is that of the modern world, still in the time of the making of the film filled with the rubble of war, such as the bombed-out Saint-Cyr military academy that serves as the film's underworld. So the entire film is a kind of balancing act between antagonistic forces, not just ugliness and beauty or ancient myth and modern reality, but also and especially Eros and Thanatos. It is, of course, dreamlike, not in the cliché surrealist manner of most movie dreams, but in the oddities of its settings: an upstairs bedroom, for example, accessible only by a trapdoor or a ladder outside the window. I'm particularly drawn to the low-tech special effects, created by obvious means: film run backward, rear-screen projection, sets built on an incline. Even if we know how the tricks are done we marvel at the magic they add. Cocteau has de-sentimentalized the Orpheus myth. The marriage of his Orpheus and Eurydice is hardly an ideal one: He's a self-centered crank, and she's a wimp. But by doing so he has made the film's "happy ending" more poignant, as the couple return to life in improved versions and the Princess and Heurtebise (a marvelously imagined character) wander deeper into the underworld. It's an ambiguous fairytale at best.

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

Josette Day and Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast

The Beast/The Prince/Avenant: Jean Marais
Belle: Josette Day
Félicie: Mila Parély
Adélaïde: Nane Germon
Ludovic: Michel Auclair
Father: Marcel André

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Based on a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Christian Bérard, Lucien Carré
Film editing: Claude Ibéria
Costume design: Antonio Castillo, Marcel Escoffier
Music: Georges Auric
Makeup: Hagop Arakelian

There are no singing teapots in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but there's more than enough magic -- almost too much to provide a satisfying ending, hence Greta Garbo's alleged lament, "Give me back my Beast." This is a fairy tale old style, which means that there's something unsettling about the happily-ever-after. Why does the Beast revert to the form of Avenant, whom it is never quite clear that Belle really loves? Where are they sailing off to at the end? Why does Belle seem oddly not quite enraptured with the turn of events? It's a sublimely erotic, if slightly kinky, film: I love the moment when, making his exit after seeing Belle, the Beast reaches out to caress the bare breast of a statue, as if copping a feel denied to him by his deeply conflicted nature. "Love can make a beast of a man," says the Prince at the end, and it's Cocteau's great achievement that this idea simmers beneath the surface of the entire film.

Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952)

If Moulin Rouge had a screenplay worthy of its visuals, it would be a classic. As it is, it's still worth seeing, thanks to a stellar effort to bring to life Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and sketches of Parisian nightlife in the 1890s. The screenplay, by Anthony Veiller and director Huston, is based on a novel by Pierre Le Mure, the rights to which José Ferrer had purchased with a view to playing Lautrec. He does so capably, subjecting himself to some real physical pain: Ferrer was 5-foot-10 and Lautrec was at least a foot shorter, owing to a childhood accident that shattered both his legs, so Ferrer performed many scenes on his knees, sometimes with an apparatus that concealed his lower legs from the camera. But that is one of the least interesting things about the movie, as is the rather conventional story of the struggles of a self-hating, alcoholic artist. What distinguishes the film is the extraordinary production design and art direction of Marcel Vertès and Paul Sheriff, and the dazzling Technicolor cinematography of Oswald Morris. Vertès and Sheriff won Oscars for their work, but Morris shockingly went unnominated. The most plausible theory for that oversight is that Sheriff clashed with the Technicolor consultants over his desire for a palette that reproduced the colors of Lautrec's art: The Technicolor corporation was notoriously persnickety about maintaining control over the way its process was used. It's possible that the cinematography branch wanted to avoid future hassles with Technicolor by denying Morris the nomination. (Ironically, one of the more interesting incidents from Lautrec's life depicted in the film involves his clashes with the lithographer over the colors used in posters made from his work.) The extraordinary beauty of the film and some lively dance sequences that bring to life performers such as La Goulue (Katherine Kath) and Chocolat (Rupert John) make it memorable. There are also good performances from Colette Marchand as Marie Charlet and Suzanne Flon as Myriamme Hayam. And less impressive work from Zsa Zsa Gabor, playing herself more than Jane Avril, and lipsynching poorly to Muriel Smith's voice in two songs by Georges Auric.