The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Beauty and the Beast (1946), directed by Jean Cocteau

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "The Beast", by Fugees

    Fairy tales are a weird thing. Originally they served as a sort of medieval after school special, teaching kids things like ‘listen to instructions or you will fucking die’, or ‘don’t talk to strangers or you will fucking die’, and in particular ‘step parents aren’t your real parents and they will never love you’. Important life lessons in the days when getting a cold was a life-or-death scenario and 12 years old was considered the prime marrying age, but in modern times those lessons have become largely obsolete, and it’s nature as an oral tradition have likewise ceased to exist. We still keep ‘em around of course, but it’s less about what those stories teach these days than it is how we can spin them. What if Red Riding Hood was an anime? How about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a raunchy sex comedy? They have become as clay, molded and remolded a million times over, which would surely be a living hell if they were sentient. But they aren’t so whatever.

    Released in 1946 through DisCina, Beauty and the Beast was written and directed by French director Jean Cocteau in his third time behind the camera. An adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s adaptation of the 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Josette Day plays Belle, a beautiful young girl who is forced into domestic work by her horrible sisters when her family falls into financial troubles. One day her father goes into town on the prospect of riches he asks his daughters what they would like as gifts. Her sisters, being your standard gold diggers ask for jewelry and other luxuries, but Belle asks for but a single rose. Because she’s the protagonist you see, and being humble is very marketable.

    Well the deal falls through, and as the father makes the journey he is set upon by a great storm and ends up lost in a forest. Things seem grim, until he manages to stumble upon a mysterious castle. He is given a meal and a nice rest (although he never sees anyone do it), but when he picks a rose from the garden he is immediately set upon by the owner of the castle, known only as the Beast (played by Jean Marais). Beast condemns the man to death for the heinous crime of doing something innocuous that he couldn’t possibly know was wrong, but being a reasonable sort of guy he offers him a deal: Give me one of your daughters and you get to live. Which the father refuses to do, but Belle decides to sacrifice herself and sneaks off to the castle, because selflessness is also very marketable. So begins the cohabitation between the beautiful Belle and the fearsome Beast, but will this really be the nightmare she has been led to believe? Or is there a spark of something more there? 

    As someone who grew up during the so-called Disney Renaissance of the 1990’s, it’s hard not to make comparisons between this Beauty and the Beast and the animated adaptation put out by DIsney during that time. Especially as there are certain elements that feature in both works, such as Beast’s leonine traits and a rival for Belle’s affections who are kind of ‘sexual assaulty’ (Gaston for Disney and Avenant in the Cocteau). While there may be an attitude among some to side with the older film just because it’s older, or because it’s closer to the source material, but in watching this film I found that Disney’s changes actually made sense. Taking out the whole wicked sisters angle was good, keeps things from feeling too derivative, and making Belle into a bookworm gave her some characteristics beyond ‘meek maiden’. More importantly though, where the Disney adaptation rings true is its focus on building the relationship between Belle and Beast. I mean let’s face it, Beauty and the Beast is ultimately a really creepy story, and the only way to make it palatable is to tone down the death threats, extortion and Stockholm Syndrome aspects. Which Cocteau’s version doesn't really do at all; If anything he makes Beast feel like even more of a creepy stalker than before, and he spends more time making the two walk slowly down hallways in silence than he does building a solid foundation for a relationship. She pities him sure, in one of the few conversations they have where he’s not pressuring her to marry him, but I don’t think pity is the same thing as love. Plus there’s this whole thing with Avenant and Beast near the end of the film which just comes across as weird and maybe a little gross. I don’t know if it was in the original Beaumont story, but it feels awkward and jams up the flow of the scene in my opinion, so I think Cocteau would have been better off changing it. The movie’s nearly a century old by this point though, so he might want to hurry up.

    Where Cocteau excels at in this film is in capturing the essence of the fairy tale, and really playing into the duality of the thing. The living furniture is the pinnacle of that, both elegant and grotesque, but really the entire castle is locked within contradictions. Belle’s bedroom which has been overtaken by greenery, elegant architecture marred with images of dragons and monsters, and so on. This is also apparent in his use of shadowplay; the darkness is so intense that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had physically painted things black in order to draw any potential light out of the scene, like the inky void in space that is the dining area, save for a fireplace and tiny Edwardian table. All of it serves to heighten the surreality of the story, of the fantastical coming against the visceral. When Belle first explores the castle she doesn’t walk down the halls she glides, and this isn’t out of place because she has stepped into the dream.

    I also appreciate the fact that Cocteau injected some humor here and there. He pays a lot of lip service to the innocence of children at the beginning of the film, and I believe he recognized that, as a children’s story, the film needed a bit of levity to break up the sturm und drang. A lesson that constantly needs to be relearned in this day and age. It also gives the sister characters something to do, quite frankly, as they’re largely superfluous compared to Avenant or even the brother character Ludovico.

    Nothing much to say about the acting. I found Josette Day’s performance as Belle to be fine, she was arguably a bit too old to be playing a maiden at that point but she got the point of Belle across. I really wasn’t all that impressed with Jean Marais as the Beast however. To his credit the Beast makeup requires him to do a lot of acting with his eyes and when he’s not talking he’s not too far removed from Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf-Man, but then he opens his mouth and his high-pitched, raspy voice marrs the whole thing. Combined with his whole ‘marry me or I’ll die of loneliness’ schtick he comes across as one of those guys who complains that the gamer girl bath water he ordered isn’t 100% authentic. Neither looking or sounding like someone you’d actually want to be in a relationship, outside of certain circles of the internet.

    Ultimately though I will give Beauty and the Beast the recommendation. Finding an adaptation of a fairy tale isn’t exactly difficult, but I think Cocteau’s unsettling, avant garde direction gives his film a unique quality that sets it apart from others. For those who want their children’s stories with a bit of an edge to it, or are interested in seeing the early years of one of France’s great filmmakers, this is a film worth checking out this Halloween. Or on a date, but I don’t think there are that many dates going on right now.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - The Killers (1946), directed by Robert Siodmak

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Mr. Brightside", by The Killers

     Try as hard as you might, but in my opinion, there’s no genre of film more American than film noir. Yes, I know that its origins lie in German Expressionism and that it was German directors who crafted the earliest and often best examples of that genre, but the imagery, the feel is undeniably American. The streetwise, no nonsense detectives, the women that are as beautiful as they are deadly, the cold and empty streets, the ravenous consumption of cigarettes and whiskey, film noir speaks to a darkly romantic vision of the United States in the 1930s and 40s just as the western genre speaks to the wild, untamed America of the 1890s. Idealized as well as unrealistic of course, but since its creation it has become an indelible part of our country’s mythology. Film noir is as much folklore as Johnny Appleseed, Davey Crockett, and Ted Bundy.

     In the world of film noir, you can’t talk about the classics (at least classic enough to be in the Criterion Collection) without mentioning The Killers, directed by German-American director Robert Siodmak. Adapted from a story by Ernest Hemingway (another piece of America’s romanticized vision of itself), the film stars Edmond O’Brien as Jim Rearden, an investigator who works for an Atlantic City Life Insurance company, who stumbles upon case in the town of Brentwood, New Jersey where a man named Pete Lund, otherwise known as the Swede, was murdered in his hotel room. Not too unbelievable even in a small town, but the crime seemed less like a robbery gone wrong and more like a professional hit, and Pete’s life insurance policy paid out to a cleaning woman who only met him a few times, and only by the name of ‘Mr. Nilsson’. Intrigued, Rearden decides to dig deeper into the life of the Swede, and as he digs the long, sad, strange story of the death of Pete Lund, a.k.a Nilsson, a.k.a Ole ‘Swede’ Anderson. His friends, his lovers, his highs and his lows, and directly in the center of it all a young woman named Kitty Collins and her green handkerchief.

     Of course, although Edmond O’Brien and the rest of the cast put in good work, the big names this time through are that of Burt Lancaster in his film debut as Ole Anderson and Ava Gardner, who was just then starting to get credited roles, as Kitty Collins. Obviously Burt had the looks to get into movies, but I think what really stands out here is this gloomy aura that seems to surround him. Ole Anderson is a man whose life can be described as a string of failures each greater than the last, and that’s what Lancaster looks like: A man who looks like he had a lot of potential in his younger days, a lot of big dreams, but the moment passed a long time ago and he could never move past it. Young, but paradoxically very weathered. A good first step on what would be a very successful career in film.

     Unlike Lancaster’s Ole, the ultimate failure, Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins is, appropriately enough, untouchable. I don’t know if you can find a more textbook depiction of the femme fatale archetype in film, and this was an era that played fast and loose with them. Kitty is beautiful, obviously, but it’s a cold beauty; A mask that she puts on in order to hide a devious mind. You can see the moments when she slips it on and it’s fascinating to see, wondering just how deep this deception goes. Pretty deep, but I’ll let you see the movie for yourselves to see what form it takes.

     If you’ve ever read a work by Hemingway, then you understand what his writing style is like: Terse, active rather than descriptive, full of that prewar listlessness. Similarly, Robert Siodmak is a very unpretentious filmmaker, so when the time came to do a movie of The Killers, Siodmak just straight up took the original story and put it on film. No muss, no fuss, no major alterations in order to fulfill the whims of a focus group, just a book that was adapted into a movie. We’ve got entire franchises based on books that don’t bother trying to keep things accurate to the source material, but here we see a movie from 50 years ago or so managing to do just that. Not so hard if you actually try, now is it?

     Siodmak’s adaptation is definitely a no-frills type of noir experience. There are no internal monologues about the city set to Miles Davis style jazz, rain and fog coating the streets like a blanket, that has been assosciated with the genre (and Frank Miller’s try-hard reproduction of it). You’ve just got a mystery to solve and a collection of bad people doing bad things to each other, and that’s it. A bit simplistic on the surface, but in spite of a lack of these more artsy touches Siodmak has made up for in strong characterization and story (although I suppose some of that credit goes to Hemingway). Pretty much every major character that comes on screen, from Rearden and Ole all the way to the nameless Killers are visually distinct, with clearly defined characters, relationships and motivations. There’s no muddled narrative here, no confusion as to why characters are doing what they’re doing (aside from what the mystery requires), it’s all very straightforward, and that’s great. It’s amazing how calming it can be to sit down and watch a movie that isn’t trying to blow your mind or reinvent the wheel , but just wants to tell a story about love and murder. No pressure, no sense that you just didn’t ‘get it’, and so easy to get invested for a while with these people’s lives. What a time.

     That’s part of the reason why The Killers is such a great movie, and if you want the rest of it you’ll just have to see it for yourselves. Highly recommended, whether it’s the Halloween season or not. Probably would make for a far easier cosplaying challenge than The Avengers, if we’re being honest.