Word: cocteau
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...Lopert), the innocent old fairy tale written in 1757 by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, seems to many surrealists to state the problem of good & evil in its "real" terms, i.e., as a sexual, male-female equation, with symbols of profane and sacred love. Poet-Playwright-Producer Jean Cocteau, a part-time surrealist, has now transformed the tale into a film that is a wondrous spectacle for children of any language, and quite a treat for their parents...
...Paris, a couple of dozen writers and painters-including Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse -dutifully responded to a cable from Charles Chaplin asking them to protest the deportation* to Germany of Hollywood Composer Hanns Eisler. To the Paris Embassy the celebrities sent their message: please let Eisler use his visa to France, where "we expect [him] to write the music for the film Alice in Wonderland." Said Cocteau: "If Eisler's music is good, who cares about his politics? . . . Politics are dirty. Art is pure...
Invited to his party this week were Lazareff Friends Prince Peter of Greece, ex-Premier Paul Reynaud, Mistinguett, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Cocteau, Cinema Producers Marcel Pagnol and René Clair, dozens of writers, Cabinet Ministers, deputies and generals. They could toast Lazareff as one of the few journalists who had lived through, without being stained by, the venal days of France's prewar press. They also could toast a proved proposition : that journalistic honesty can pay off in France...
...Eagle Has Two Heads (translated from the French of Jean Cocteau by Ronald Duncan; produced by John C. Wilson) and, what's more remarkable, flies backwards. Famed French Avant-Gardist Cocteau's "romantic melodrama" is outdated purple-&-plush palace theatrics, which starts off with a poet-revolutionist plunging through a window into the royal boudoir, and winds up with a dying queen toppling headlong down a vast flight of stairs...
When an almost oppressively sophisticated writer turns out so highfalutin a play, there may well be method, even if there is no meaning, in his claptrap. Very possibly Cocteau meant to polish up a lot of passe heroics into a rococo extravaganza that would be lively theater to boot. And very possibly The Eagle Has Two Heads is full of brilliant rhetoric, in French. But on Broadway it is just a grimly gaudy bore. Nor, for all her fire and force, can Actress Bankhead act it the one way that might be effective-with high artifice, in the immensely grand...