Word: cocteau
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Monte Carlo's summer season reached a social crescendo with an anti-polio March of Francs party featuring two hours of husky-throated songs by Marlene Dietrich. But Marlene seemed almost an anticlimax to Poet Jean Cocteau's freshly penned introduction, eloquently recited by French Cinemactor Jean Marais: "Your name begins with a caress and ends with a whiplash. You wear feathers and furs which seem to be part of your body like the furs of beasts and the feathers of birds . . . There comes to us, in full sail, a frigate, a prow's figurehead, a Chinese...
...What Cocteau allowed to become trick photography in Orpheus he kept as normal-if extraordinarily clever-direction in Beauty. Working with Miss Day, and with Jean Marais as the Beast, the director made an elementary and familiar plot into a small triumph of mood and attitude: a fairy tale for the bigger kids. ROBERT J. SCHOENBERG
...Jean Cocteau realized that fairy stories are really much too good to be left entirely up to the wretched treatment they receive from story-book writers. So, striking a blow for the adult world, he made Beauty And The Beast. And after the first half hour of sustained suspense, horror and weird doings, it is obvious that the basic material is not fit for juvenile consumption, it's too scary...
Despite the slight dissatisfaction caused by the paling of Beauty's more spectacular effects, it remains an excellent picture, and a young classic. Like many of his fellow European directors, Cocteau dominates his work. Since, almost by tradition, fairy tales are short on precise or involved characterization, Cocteau could not rely on sympathy to hold the audience's interest on the mystic proceedings. Nevertheless, he grips, and almost strangles each viewer's attention. Nor does he just exploit weird effects. Cocteau's directional touches such as camera angles and positions, lighting and movement of the actors are things that would...
...this field and went on a new tack. In the next two decades HDC devoted itself almost exclusively to giving American premieres to foreign playwrights, a policy which attracted considerable interest in its productions. Among the foreign writers to whom HDC gave first American productions were Maeterlinck, Guitry, Galsworthy, Cocteau, and A. A. Milne. The club also went out of its way to produce unusual native plays like John Dos Passos' The Moon is a Gong in 1925 and Auden and Isherwood's Dog Beneath the Skin in 1936. During this time the HDC had no theater to work with...