Film: "La Belle et la Bete"
Jean Cocteau’s fairy-tale masterpiece, which inspired all “Beauty and the Beast” adaptations to come.
The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire and death in Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece, newly restored to its original glorious black-and-white splendor, serve as inspiration for all cinematic “Beauty and the Beast” tales to come, from the Disney animated fare to Guillermo del Toro’s genre-bender The Shape of Water.
Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings; the poems, plays, and novels; the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films will have the most enduring influence, and among those Beauty and the Beast will have the most pervasive effect. When it comes to fairy-tale movies, there is this landmark, and then there is everything else.
D: Jean Cocteau, France, subtitled, 1946, Runtime: 1h33m
