Original title: La Belle et la bête

There have been many adaptations of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, some traditional, some more experimental. By far the best remains Jean Cocteau’s magnificent 1946 version which sits somewhere between the two, retaining the traditional elements of the original while exploring the possibilities to bend, twist and even break reality offered by film. Overflowing with images that are instantly recognisable even to those who haven’t seen the film, it’s a visual feast, one that’s largely devoid of the more philosophical concerns of Cocteau’s later fantasies, the similarly magnificent Orphée (1950) and its sequel Le Testament d’Orphée (1960).

It starts with the film crew in full view of the audience, the credits being chalked onto a board, a clapperboard in full view, Cocteau playfully toying with the artifice of cinema. The whole film, in fact, is built on artifice with its fake forests and a studio-bound castle, and therein lies much of its considerable charm. Cocteau steers clear of the fantastique for the first quarter of an hour or so as we’re introduced to Belle (Josette Day), the daughter of a recently impoverished merchant (Marcel André), virtually ruined after losing many of his ships at sea. Her brother’s friend Avenant (Jean Marais) tries to persuade her to marry him, but Belle wants to stay with her father and turns him down. The family’s luck seems to be on the up when father returns home with news that he’s come into a fortune that he will collect the next day, promising to return with presents for Belle, her sisters Adélaïde (Nane Germon) and Félicie (Mila Parély) and brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair). The sisters want a monkey and a parrot, Ludovic secretly signs a contract from a moneylender (Raoul Marco) that could cost the family their new wealth but all the ever-faithful Belle wants is a rose. But the fortune has been seized to clear the merchant’s debts and, still penniless, he makes his way home, gets lost in a forest and finds himself at the gates of a large castle.

It’s at this point that the film is transformed into pure fantasy as the merchant enters the castle and is guided by enchanted candelabras made of human arms that extend through the walls to a dinner table where he falls asleep after eating the food he finds there. Woken by a loud, animal-like roar, he flees, stopping only to plucks a rose from a tree for Belle and is met by the castle’s owner, The Beast (Jean Marais again) who threatens to kill him for theft. He agrees to spare his life but only if the merchant sends him one of his daughters. Back home, Belle agrees to go to the castle where she’s initially terrified by The Beast but slowly comes to realise that he might just be her true love…

Once we reach the castle, Cocteau allows his imagination to run riot and crams the film with so many fantastical images and moments that the film frequently teeters on the absurd. He never loses control though, thanks in part to his decision to often make the film as terrifying as it is magical. There are some marvellously grim moments, like the smoke that curls from The Beast’s body after he’s killed (we’re not really sure if his victim was animal of human) and others that are strangely disturbing because of our inability to process correctly what we’re seeing – there’s a terrific scene where Belle, allowed to visit her ailing father, uses a teleportation glove o reach the castle and materialises through the wall, a marvellous effect, simple enough when you think about it but remarkably surreal and breath-taking all the same.

Cocteau takes the praise for the film – rightly so – but as he was returning to film-making after a fifteen year break since his debut film, Le Sang d’un poète/The Blood of a Poet (1930) and would surely have leant heavily after such a long break on the talents of his art directors Christian Bérard, set decorators René Moulaert and Lucien Carré, and cinematographer Henri Alekan to help create the otherworldly look of the film. They were trying to replicate the look of Gustave Doré’s illustrations and engravings and do so admirably. The interior of the castle of one of the most perfectly and consistently realised fairy tale settings ever seen on film, the glorious sets built on soundstages at no fewer than three of France’s studios, Franstudio Studio in Saint-Maurice, in the Val-de-Marne, Eclair Studio in Epinay sur Seine and Joinville Studios in Joinville le Pont.

The film’s effects may have been achieved in low-tech ways that could easily be dismissed as crude and primitive today, but in fact they’re as impressive now as they were in 1946, marvels of old-school technical wizardry that still cause much head-scratching over how some of them were done. As key to the film’s visual success as the design and photography was the magnificent make-up of The Beast, created by Hagop Arakelian. It’s a stunning piece of work that wouldn’t be surpassed for many years, as scary as it is fascinating and allowing Marais (whose pet dog supposedly inspired The Beast’s look) enough room to deliver a surprisingly nuanced and often very moving performance.

Beauty and the Beast was an immediate hit both at home in France and elsewhere and has continued to exert a real fascination for many decades since. Jacques Demy’s Peau d’âne/Donkey Skin (1970) repeatedly quotes from Cocteau (Demy even casts Marais in a key role); the Faerie Tale Theatre adaptation of the story from August 1984 owes it a similar debt, as does the mini-series Angels in America (2003) that borrowed the look of the interior of The Beast’s castle in a dream sequence; the eponymous lycanthrope in Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) is a close relation to The Beast; and Philip Glass created a trilogy of operas based on Cocteau’s work, including one adapted from La Belle et la Bête.

Cocteau didn’t make many films (just six in total, the others not mentioned already being L’Aigle à deux têtes/The Eagle with Two Heads (1948) and Les Parents terribles/The Terrible Parents (1948)) but the ones he did make are all remarkable. But Beauty and the Beast remains his finest moment, a gorgeous, unforgettable and influential film that should impress all but the most jaded of fantasy film lovers even now.