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.

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Elena et les hommes (Jean Renoir, 1956)

Like French Cancan (1954) and The Golden Coach (1952), this is one of Renoir's brightly Technicolored entertainments, with ravishing cinematography by his nephew, Claude Renoir, that recalls the rich colors of the paintings by Jean's father and Claude's grandfather, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. And like many of those paintings, the movie opens itself up to criticisms of possessing more style than substance. Elena et les hommes, which was originally released in the United States under the title Paris Does Strange Things, is a giddy, somewhat brainless romp whose chief claim to our attention is that it was the first film Ingrid Bergman made after her break from Roberto Rossellini. I watched it just after having seen three of those films -- Stromboli (1950), Voyage to Italy (1954), and Fear (1954) -- in which Bergman is put to extremes of emotional torment. Making Elena must have been an enormous relief for her, because it shows: She has never been more beautiful onscreen, wearing the opulent finery of 1880s Paris. She has also never been more lively or funny, throwing herself with complete abandon into the nonsense of the plot. It makes me regret that she did so few comedies: Only Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958) and Cactus Flower (Gene Saks, 1969) gave her a real chance to lighten up the way Renoir's film does, although she showed her comic skills by parodying her more glum roles, especially the doughty missionary in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958), in her Oscar-winning performance in Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974). It's too bad that her leading men in Elena aren't up to her standards: Jean Marais looks like he doesn't understand what's going on (which is understandable when so much is), while Mel Ferrer looks like he gets it but can't quite overcome the handicap of being Mel Ferrer when what is needed is a Cary Grant or a James Stewart to match Bergman's skills.