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.

Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)

Walter Matthau and Audrey Hepburn in Charade

Peter Joshua: Cary Grant
Regina Lampert: Audrey Hepburn
Hamilton Bartholomew: Walter Matthau
Tex Panthollow: James Coburn
Herman Scobie: George Kennedy
Leopold W. Gideon: Ned Glass
Sylvie Gaudet: Dominique Minot
Inspector Grandpierre; Jacques Marin

Director: Stanley Donen
Screenplay: Peter Stone, Marc Behm
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Jean d'Eaubonne
Music: Henry Mancini

Charade was dismissed in its day as a pleasant but derivative entertainment, with touches of Hitchcock and a bit of James Bond in the mix, a film that would be nothing without its star teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It would also inspire other star-teamed romantic adventures with one-word titles, like Warren Beatty and Susannah York in Kaleidoscope (Jack Smight, 1966) and Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine in Gambit (Ronald Neame, 1966), and Charade's director, Stanley Donen, would even repeat the formula with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Arabesque (1966). But Charade has survived today as a classic when the others have mostly been forgotten. The star teaming has a lot to do with it, of course: Who doesn't want to see the two most charming people in the world together? Owing to Grant's genetic gift for looking much younger than he was, even the 25-year age difference between Grant and Hepburn only slightly tests the limits of what one can accept in a romantic pairing.* But the film also makes sly references to the difference in their ages, and wisely makes Hepburn's character into the more active one in initiating a relationship. Charade also has an exceptionally witty screenplay, with Peter Stone largely responsible for the final script from the story he and Mark Behm had been unable to sell to the studios until they turned it into a novel that was serialized in Redbook magazine. And it has a near-perfect supporting cast, including three actors at turning points in their careers: Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. All of them would move out of television and into the movies after Charade, and all three would win Oscars for their work. And in Stanley Donen it had a director whose lightness of touch had been honed in MGM musicals, including the greatest of them all, Singin' in the Rain (1952).

Watched on Showtime

*Compare, for example, the similar age gap between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). After that film, Stewart gave up playing romantic leads. Grant made much the same choice: Charade was his antepenultimate film: Although he would make one more, Father Goose (Ralph Nelson, 1964), that paired him with a younger actress, Leslie Caron, in his final film, Walk, Don't Run (Charles Walters, 1966), he was the older man who serves as matchmaker to young lovers -- a role that was based on the part played by Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943).

Madame de... (Max Ophuls, 1953)

The word "tone" is much bandied about by critics, myself included. We speak of a film as being "inconsistent in tone" or its "melancholy,  despairing tone" or its "shifts in tone." But ask us -- or, anyway, me -- what we mean by the term, and you may get a lot of stammering and hesitation. Even my old copy of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics falls back on calling it "an intangible quality ... like a mood in a human being." So when I say that Madame de... is a masterwork in its manipulation of tone, you have to take that observation as a kind of awestruck, slightly inarticulate response to a film that begins in farce and ends in tragedy. The American title of the film was The Earrings of Madame de..., but to my mind that puts the emphasis on what is, in effect, merely a MacGuffin. The earrings were given to Countess Louise de... (Danielle Darrieux) by her husband, General André de... (Charles Boyer), on their wedding day. (Their full surname is coyly hidden throughout the film: A sound blots out the latter part of the name when it is spoken, and it is hidden by a flower when it appears on a place card at a banquet. The effect is rather like a newspaper gossip column trying to avoid a libel suit when reporting a scandal among the aristocracy.) The scandal is set in motion when Louise, a flirtatious woman with many admirers, decides to sell the earrings to pay off the debts she wants to hide from André. Their marriage has obviously come to a pause: Though they remain affectionate with each other, they have separate bedrooms and at night they talk to each other through doors that open on a connecting room. Louise takes the earrings to the jeweler (Jean Debucourt) from whom André originally purchased them. But when she tries to persuade André that she lost them at the opera and the "theft" is reported in the newspapers, the jeweler tries to sell them back to the general. To put an end to the business, André pays for them, then presents them to his mistress, Lola (Lia Di Leo), as a parting gift: Their affair over, she is leaving for Constantinople. There, Lola gambles them away, but they are bought by an Italian diplomat, Baron Donati (Vittorio De Sica), who is on his way to a posting in Paris. And of course Donati meets Louise, they fall in love, and he presents the earrings to her as a gift. Recognizing them, she has no recourse but to hide them, but they will resurface with fatal results. How Max Ophuls gradually shades this plot from a situation suited to a Feydeau farce into a poignant conclusion is a part of the film's magic. It depends to a great extent on the superb performances of Darrieux, Boyer, and De Sica, but also on Ophuls's typically restless camera, handled -- as in Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), and Lola Montès (1955) -- by cinematographer Christian Matras, as it explores Jean d'Eaubonne's elegant fin de siècle sets. Much depends, too, on the film editor, Borys Lewin, who helps Ophuls accomplish one of the movies' great tours de force, following Louise and Donati as they dance what appears to be an extended waltz but gradually shows itself to be several waltzes taking place over the period of time in which they fall in love. It's a cinematic showpiece, but it's fully integrated into what has to be one of the great movies.

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)

Pleasure, as the poets never tire of telling us, is inextricable from pain.  Le Plaisir is an anthology film dramatizing three stories by Guy de Maupassant that center on what has been called the pleasure-pain perplex. An elderly man nearly dances himself to death in an attempt to recapture his youth. The patrons of a brothel quarrel and even come to blows when they discover that it is closed. An artist marries his mistress to atone for his cruelty to her. Max Ophuls brings all of his elegant technique to the stories, including his characteristic restless camera, which prowls around the wonderful sets by Jean d'Eaubonne, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for art direction. It's also, like Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), an all-star production -- if your stars are French. Claude Dauphin plays the doctor who treats the youth-seeking dancer; Madeleine Renaud is the madame of the brothel, Danielle Darrieux is one of her "girls," and Jean Gabin plays the madame's brother, who invites her to bring the girls to the country for his daughter's first communion, hence the temporary closure of the brothel; Daniel Gélin is the artist, Simone Simon his model/mistress, and Jean Servais his friend who also narrates the final section. Of the three segments of the film, the middle one is the longest and I think the most successful, moving from the raucous opening scene in which the men of the small Normandy town discover the brothel closed into a comic train ride to the country, which is as fetchingly pastoral a setting as you could wish. The sequence climaxes with the filles de joie dissolving in tears at the first communion -- the little church in which it takes place is one of d'Eaubonne's most inspired sets -- then returning to town and a joyous welcome. Intriguingly, Ophuls never lets us inside the brothel: We see it only as voyeurs, through the windows. Nothing of this segment is "realistic" in the least, making the melancholy first and last segments more important in establishing the film's theme and tone. The first segment does its part to set up the course of the film as a whole, beginning with a riotous opening as tout Paris flocks to the opening of a dance hall, a pleasure palace, followed by scenes of lively dancing, then the collapse of the elderly patron, who is wearing a frozen and rather creepy mask of youth, and concluding with the bleakness of his normal existence, tended by his aging wife, who is fittingly played by Gaby Morlay, once a silent film gamine. The final segment is the bleakest of all, as the film concludes with the artist pushing his wheelchair-bound wife along the seashore, penance for having provoked her suicide attempt. The film leaves me with something like the feeling I get from the song "Plaisir D'Amour."

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment. 
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie. 

The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Casque d'or (Jacques Becker, 1952)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival

A gangster movie/love story set in the underworld of Paris at the start of the 20th century, Casque d'or feels slight, but its images have a way of tantalizing you. Perhaps that's because it evokes paintings like Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at Bougival and Luncheon of the Boating Party. Jacques Becker began his career as an assistant to Pierre-Auguste's son, Jean Renoir, so it's easy to guess that there's an element of hommage in Becker's film. (Jean Renoir's wife, Marguerite, also worked as Becker's film editor.) The film's title, which translates as "golden helmet," is a reference to the blond hair of Marie (Simone Signoret), whom we first see as part of a boating party that lands at a riverside dance hall. Marie is the mistress of the gangster Roland (William Sabatier), but they're clearly not getting along. So when a stranger, Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), joins the company at the dance hall, Marie begins to flirt with him. Meanwhile, the head of the criminal syndicate of which Roland is a part, Félix Leca (Claude Dauphin), is also making a play for Marie. Georges is an ex-con, trying to go straight as a carpenter, but he is drawn into a fatal involvement with Marie. The performances of Signoret, Reggiani, and Dauphin, as well as a colorful supporting cast, carry the rather thin story a long way, greatly helped by Becker's finesse as a director. There is a real chemistry between Signoret and Reggiani, which Becker had noticed in their previous teaming as the prostitute and the soldier who set the sexual carousel turning in La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950). In their first dance together, which is reprised in a haunting flashback at the film's end, Georges holds Marie with one hand on her waist and the other arm hanging free at his side -- a suggestion of their innate intimacy. Later, when Georges sees her again at a café, Marie is dancing with Roland, but she keeps her gaze focused on Georges: Becker and cinematographer Robert Lefebvre execute a dizzying tour de force in following the spinning couple around the dance floor, as Marie turns to look at Georges after every spin. The evocation of the seamy side of the Belle Époque is greatly aided by the production design by Jean d'Eaubonne and the costumes by Mayo (né Antoine Malliarakis).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party

La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950)

Love supposedly makes the world go around, but in La Ronde it's sex that provides the spin. Ophuls and his fellow screenwriter, Jacques Natanson, put us in the hands of a narrator (Anton Walbrook) who facilitates the couplings of the various characters, beginning with a prostitute and a soldier, followed by the soldier's liaison with a chambermaid, her fling with the young man for whom she works, his with a married woman, and so on, until the merry-go-round (a literal presence on the screen) brings us back again to the prostitute. It's an ingenious business, first devised for the stage by the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 -- one reason why the film takes place in Vienna in 1900. At its best, La Ronde is a showcase for some lovely performances, including Walbrook's, but also those of Simone Signoret as the prostitute, Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Danielle Darrieux as the married woman, and, later in the circle dance, Jean-Louis Barrault as a pretentious poet. There are some witty moments: When one of the characters experiences erectile dysfunction, the merry-go-round breaks down and the narrator-facilitator is forced to repair it. In 1950, the movie taught American audiences who got a chance to see it what they were missing because of the hidebound Production Code. The Academy, whose members often chafed against the Code, honored it with two Oscar nominations: Ophuls and Natanson for their screenplay and Jean d'Eaubonne for art direction. Ophuls has a little fun with the censors, too, when one very close encounter is interrupted by the narrator seizing the film and cutting a section from it. Our age, haunted by various STD's, might take a darker view of the film's blithe copulation, which is why, I think, Ophuls's film seems a little hollow: too much style, not enough substance. Even in its day, La Ronde was little more than a charming anachronism, a fantasia about a world that never was, and if it had been, would have been swept away by two World Wars.

Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955)

A commercial disaster when it was released, Ophuls's opulent and expensive last film was heavily cut in a effort to salvage it, and after the director's death a little more than a year after its premiere it suffered from neglect. But it had hugely influential admirers among the Cahiers du cinéma set, French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut, and American auteur theorists like Andrew Sarris. The persistence of the cult of Lola Montès has resulted in a restoration of the film to something like what audiences once saw (and rejected): a giddy, dreamlike tale of the rise and fall of a fabulous 19th-century courtesan, mistress to Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) and King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook), among perhaps many others. Martine Carol is Lola, and her story is told by the ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of a circus in which she is the principal attraction. Ophuls pulled out all the stops, including rather garish Eastmancolor and an unusually restless use of CinemaScope. The camera, supervised by cinematographer Christian Matras, rarely stands still, meandering among the many layers of the sets designed by Jean d'Eaubonne -- every building, from the humblest inn to the most baroque castle, seems to have endless flights of stairs connecting its many stories. There is a kind of feverish fun to the whole thing, as long as you're not interested in the real Lola Montez, who didn't wind up in a cage as a long queue of circus-going men waited to kiss her. You can say it's a kind of meditation on the nature of celebrity or on the double standard that judges women's sexuality in a different way than men's. You can see Lola as a precursor of Marilyn Monroe -- the goddess of the era in which the movie was made. Or you can just sit back and experience the astonishing flow of images that Ophuls directs past us. Is it a great film? I'd be content with just calling it unique, which in an artistic medium like the movies, so dependent on the tried and true, is perhaps greatness enough.