Word: cocteau
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...Jean Cocteau's first English language movie has had its title routinely sexified from Les Parents Terribles to Intimate Relations, but current visitors to the Beacon Hill will be glad to find that Cocteau, no matter what title he uses, well merits his reputation for unorthodox screenplay...
Speaking colloquially, one might describe the story of intimate relations as "incredible." (As matter of fact the movie's five characters, who speak extremely colloquially, themselves describe it with just that word at least twenty times during the evening.) Basically, the plot resembles the eternal loves triangle. Cocteau's imagination is such, however, that in this case the such, however, that in this case the triangle turns out to be a pentagon, and at one point the principals even try to straighten things out by introducing another, imaginary person as a sixth vertex...
...French, as usual, made a handful of fine, original films. Jean Cocteau sent over, in Intimate Relations, what amounts to a formal photograph of an Oedipus complex: a devilish picture, devilishly well made. By contrast there was a flash of the old gaite parisienne in Beauties of the Night, by Rene Clair; and Jacques Tad, in Mr. Hulot's Holiday, composed something like a ballet of pratfalls. In Diary of a Country Priest, adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos, the camera watched a body dissolve in spirit, while in Pit of Loneliness the spirit of a feeling woman...
Directed and adapted by Jean Cocteau, The Queen's Lover is just the kind of swashbuckling romance that was one the glory of Douglas Fairbanks. In fact, one scene of church chandelier-swinging would have been worthy of the master himself...
Within hours of his death, the living began to reckon Matisse's achievements. London Critic T. W. Earp called him "one of painting's lyric poets." In Paris, the French Minister of Education stated that Matisse commanded "the most French of palettes." Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau went further without stretching the truth very much: "He was a bright...