Word: beastes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...story of "Beauty and the Beast' (English Title) is the familiar one of the prince, enchanted into a hideous monster, who can regain his former state only through the true love of a girl. The Beauty is a girl of humble station and religious soul who is kept by the Beast in his castle. She penetrates the ugly coating of his appearance to feel first pity for the Beast, then real love-thus breaking the spell...
Against this beauty a sinister but obviously not thoroughly bad force wages its fight. The darkness of the nights, the denseness of the forest, and the character of the Beast are evil, but an evil through which good is always trying to burst...
Whether "Beauty and the Beast" gets its contrast of light and dark fully home to its audiences is a question to be decided only by these audiences. Critics have differed on the effectiveness of the film in making its point, indeed on the technical devices themselves...
Fantasy is as you like it in any case. Some people have carped at Cocteau for 'inadequate' makeup of the Beast. if you want to believe, then the makeup of the Beast is of no interest; if you do not want, to the smallest item can destroy the illusion. Those who can appreciate fantasy will find in this Cocteau effort a masterpiece in the form, a work of chidlike loveliness and conviction...
...wife had to open a hat store to support Matisse and their three children, but it did not stay open long; by 1908 buyers had begun to see the beauty of the beast's work. In that year he published his ambiguous Notes of a Painter, which have been quoted as his final word ever since. "What I dream of," he wrote, "is an art that is equilibrated, pure and calm, free of disturbing subject matter ... a means of soothing the soul . . . like a comfortable armchair. . . ." That simile has led critics to expect far less of Matisse than...