Beauty and the Beast

When Cocteau finished "Beauty and the Beast" in 1946 I don't know whether he had seen "The Wizard of Oz" made six years earlier in 1939. There was a war on. I can't get over how little he had to go on with "Beast": it was essentially a picture book, a text and some black and white drawings. I have to get those drawings...but it seems like a huge amount of the imagery is Cocteau's: the look of the beast with the big head, high collar and fangs and the animated mansion with those arms sticking out of the walls. Whereas "The Wizard of Oz" started as a picture book, then was turned into a play before the movie was made, so it was the music and a lot of the dialogue that was original. The imagery had been established: I remember a photo of a tinman costume from the 30's, and the whole thing is already there, including the funnel on the head. But "Beast" is almost completely from Cocteau's imagination.... I have to get those drawings.

And, intentionally or not, for a "monster in a haunted house" movie, it's un-German or un-Gothic. (There's only one 4 second Gothic touch: when the father comes to the door, his shadow grows in size, even though he's standing still; it's a trick he stole from Murnau. But that's it.) When I first saw the movie 35 years ago, I was most impressed with how many scenes are filmed outside, in bright sunshine. It's really the exact opposite of "Alien."



It's amazing to think that they gave Cocteau all that money and the resources to make a major motion picture when he had only made a few arty films ("Blood of a Poet" - sure, I liked it, but it's not exactly "Gone with the Wind") and really he had only his reputation as a poet, painter and a gay public intellectual. He had a huge ego, and he also had that old-school notion - almost completely gone now - that if you had a really good education in the Classics: the art, philosophy, and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, then you could do anything, from making a great work of art to running a country.