COMMENTARY : Cocteau’s 1946 ‘Beauty’: Pure Magic

An artist and poet as well as a filmmaker, Jean Cocteau did more than believe in magic, he knew how to create it, and how to make it last. His 1946 “Beauty and the Beast,” opening an eight-day revival Wednesday at the NuWilshire in Santa Monica with a stunning new print just as the Disney animated version is enjoying its Oscar nominations, is more than a triumph of French cinema and one of the most romantic films ever made. It is a movie touched by genius.

Though writer-director Cocteau was very much of a flamboyant personality, the paradoxical truth is that “Beauty” gets its strength from the cleanness and restraint of his almost documentary take on the 17th-Century fairy tale. Someone who believed that “mystery exists only in precise things,” Cocteau created a timeless film that took suspension of disbelief as an absolute matter of course. “Children believe what we tell them, they have complete faith in us,” he writes in the film’s on-screen prologue. “I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity.”

Unlike the Disney version, Cocteau’s “Beauty” sticks fairly closely to the original Madame Leprince de Beaumont tale. Beauty (the ethereal Josette Day) is first seen, Cinderella-like, scrubbing floors while her pair of snobbish, haughty older sisters pout around the neighborhood. Though she has a suitor, the handsome Avenant, Beauty is hesitant about leaving her frail penniless father, a merchant whose ships have a habit of not coming in.

It is while returning from a trip to inquire about one of those ships that Beauty’s father stumbles on an enchanted castle deep in the forest. After spending a night there without seeing a soul, he is about to leave but stops to pick a rose for Beauty. Suddenly, the redoubtable Beast appears. “You may take anything but my roses,” he announces with the magisterial clarity that characterizes Cocteau’s limpid script. “For this you must die.”

As played by Jean Marais, a young protege of Cocteau’s who became a star as a result of his work here, the Beast is an indelible figure of enormous dignity. Magnificently dressed and with an extremely realistic leonine face (created by Christian Berard and requiring hours in makeup to apply), the Beast is the picture of regal self-command and ironic self-knowledge. “Don’t call me ‘Sir,’ ” he says to the stunned merchant. “I am called the Beast. I do not like compliments.”

Once Beauty comes to the castle to save her father’s life by taking his place, we see another side to things. The Beast now becomes a sad-eyed creature with a soul, crueler to himself than to humans and possessed of a somber, heartbreaking voice that Cocteau described as that of “a monster in pain.” Tortured by his bestial drive to kill, which leaves him with hands literally smoking, he is painfully believable as a brute fully capable of dying of a broken heart if Beauty, who he eventually allows to return to visit her sick father, fails to return to him.

Besides Marais’ performance and an evocative Georges Auric score that leans heavily on choral elements, “Beauty” benefits from the gorgeous cinematography of Henri Alekan. As revealed in the NuWilshire’s spanking-new print, the film’s beautifully lit Vermeer-inspired look is composed of exquisitely modulated shades of black, white and gray that create a moody, poetic atmosphere a full-color production couldn’t hope to match.

Holding everything together is Cocteau’s exact sense of how the film should look and even sound. Especially telling is his simple but exceptionally effective use of on-screen trickery. In truth, Cocteau’s special effects are almost primitive, more stage-bound than cinematic and often involving such basic devices as slow motion, reverse projection and plain old billowing smoke. But because he was an artist in the best sense, and because this film clearly came from his heart, the sense of pure fantasy magic that “Beauty and the Beast” conveys is greater than all of this year’s big-budget Hollywood elephants combined.

Making this success even more unusual is the fact that “Beauty and the Beast” was filmed under the most trying conditions. As revealed in Cocteau’s own “Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film” (available in English translation from Dover Books), both the technical and health obstacles the production had to overcome were formidable, including an agonizing combination of flu, arc burns and skin problems that put the director in Paris’ Pasteur Institute for a week feeling “as though my neck were being sawn through with a blunt saw.”

Though “Beauty and the Beast” is remarkably straightforward, Cocteau does permit himself one small diversion. He cast Marais as not only the Beast but also Beauty’s suitor Avenant and even the Prince who magically appears in the Beast’s place at the close, and it is clear that Beauty misses the much more interesting, albeit hairier, suitor who is now gone forever from her life. In this, she is not alone. Greta Garbo’s reaction to the film’s finale, or so the story goes, was equally simple and to the point: “Give me back,” she exclaimed, “my Beast.”