BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Directed by Jean Cocteau

1946 / 95min

With Jean Marais and Josette Day; score by Georges Auric. “Jean Cocteau’s first full-length movie is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday daily life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty’s farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast’s enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard’s makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast.” –Pauline Kael