Beauty and the Beast
All actors and roles (10)
All team (15)
Short description
Jean Cocteau wrote and directed this French fantasy drama, based on the fairy tale by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. A merchant, lost in the forest, picks a rose from the garden of a strange castle for his youngest daughter, Belle, and is condemned to death by the castle's monstrous master. Belle agrees to take her father's place and moves into the Beast's home. There she comes to see that the creature, part man and part animal, is gentler than his appearance suggests. Jean Marais plays the Beast, the Prince and Avenant; Josette Day plays Belle, with Marcel André as her father, Mila Parély and Nane Germon as her sisters and Michel Auclair as her brother Ludovic.
The film was Cocteau's first as director, released in 1946 and followed by Testament of Orpheus in 1960. It came from producer André Paulvé's company, ran 96 minutes and remains the best known of Cocteau's films, drawing on the visual tricks of his work as a poet and artist as much as on conventional storytelling.
Critical and popular responses sit close together. On IMDb it holds 7.9 out of 10 from around 30,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 from a smaller group of users. A critics' rating of 9.2 from 67 reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores. Its reputation rests on the dreamlike imagery of the Beast's household rather than on the familiar romance alone.
What's left behind the scenes
- Jean Cocteau long considered the appearance of the Beast. He wanted to give him a deer's head (in memory of the ancient deity Cernunnos) until Jean Marais convinced him that such a mask was entirely unsuitable for a fierce and enraged beast.
- In his autobiography, Jean Marais recalls that it took three hours every day to apply makeup to just one face; he developed eczema from wearing the mask. He lived on porridge alone because of the false teeth. During the making of the film, Cocteau himself was also hospitalized with a severe allergic illness.
- The film is based on the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" (La Belle et la Bête, 1757) by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.
- In 1995, composer Philip Glass created an opera of the same name, fully synchronizing it with scenes from Cocteau's film. The idea was for musicians and singers to perform the opera on stage while the newly restored film was shown on a screen behind them.
- The elaborate costumes for the film were made by the Parisian fashion house Paquin. A young Pierre Cardin worked on the film as a male costume designer.
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