La Belle et la Bête

The rose, the horse, the key, the mirror, and the glove. 1/29/07

Roger Ebert writes: Before Disney's 1991 film, Jean Cocteau filmed Beauty and the Beast in 1946, in France. It is one of the most magical of all films. Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup, here is a fantasy alive with trick shots and astonishing effects, giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal. Cocteau, a poet and surrealist, was not making a "children's film," but was adapting a classic French tale that he felt had a special message after the suffering of World War II: Anyone who has an unhappy childhood may grow up to be a Beast.

I wrote in the margin: But "love can make an ugly man handsome."
which I believe is a line in the dialogue, but which really means that love is a redeemer.

Beauty and the Beast was the first film I tackled after I decided to try watching each of the 100 movies in Roger Ebert's Great Movies book. My Mom gifted it to me on Christmas of 2006, after I'd devoured so many of his essays online that it'd become a bona fide obesssion. I went back to favorite movies with fresh eyes, learned about new ones, and became fascinated with cinema in general because of Ebert's writing. A piece of good writing, for me, is one that will have me on Wikipedia for an hour afterward, looking up this and that. I also blame the blah Seattle winters for sparking a passion in film. Since I moved here from Florida, where I grew up, in 2003, each lowering of the bell jar--the descent of gray after Halloween that doesn't let up until May or so--finds my knowledge in movies and microbrews deepening (and my waistline expanding).

Returning to work after New Years, I was thrilled to discover that a colleague had many of the Great Movies in his office collection. He let me take a couple per week. I didn't expect to love Beauty so much. I hadn't seen many pre-'60s movies, and most of the French films I'd seen were more like dares: fall asleep, and you lose. I watched Beauty alone over two cold winter nights, while drinking a French Syrah ("appropriate, oui?"). It was an oddly sensual winter...I was living alone, enjoying the last of my painkillers from having teeth pulled, and dating a passionate person. So I was in the perfect state for Beauty to thoroughly charm! I found it funny, spooky, erotic, "not a jolly comic musical but deals, as all fairy tales do, with what we dread and desire," as Ebert wrote. Some thoughts I wrote down:

*I'm so glad I watched this! I wouldn't have known it existed for a long time probably. Beauty and the Beast was my favorite of the Disney flicks coming up, much preferred over Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc. But who would have told me about this version?

*I put an exclamation point near the graph where Ebert shares that Marlene Dietrich held Cocteau's hand at Beauty's first screening. Disappointed at the cookie-cutter prince who appears at the end, she shouted out for the Beast. What a moment that must have been!

*The problem with DVDs: this movie is 90 minutes long, but I'm sure it took twice that to watch because I kept rewinding scenes:

-The sparkling hair of the white horse when Belle whispers, "Go where I am going, La Magnifique! Go, Go, Go" in its ear.

-When Belle first enters the castle, not tentatively like her father had; and when she returns, shouting.

-When Belle is away, the Beast wanders through her room obviously in despair. He taps his heart with his paw and picks up the fur blanket from her bed and buries his face in it (!!!).

-An androgynous Diana's drawn arrow.