Word: iseult
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...Eternal Return," the French writer Jean Cocteau explains that the title is borrowed from Nietzsche, and that it means great legends of the past may re-occur without their participants being aware of it. with this interesting idea in mind, M. Cocteau has chosen to present the Tristan-Iseult legend in contemporary settings and in something of the same grand-manner that was to be so successful in his later film "Beauty and the Beast." But, unlike its successor, "The Eternal Return" asks the audience to accept its fairy tale as readily as if it were in today's headlines...
...role of Patrice (Tristan), Cocteau has placed his favorite actor, Jean Marais. Though probably not a very good actor, he serves Cocteau's requirements well enough: he is beautiful, dashing and ethereal. Nathalie (Iseult), is played by a new actress, Madeleine Sologne. The role calls for her to be a little fey, but Mlle. Sologne behaves as if she hadn't read her Master's foreward. She seems, from the beginning, to be "aware" that she is Iseult. She is also too heavily made up for so pretty a young lady and actually is more attractive when the lipstick...
...cannot say how stunned and revolted I was to see the local censors had cut the last half-minute from the film. In the final scene Iseult rushes to her lover's deathbed and arrives too late. She, too, is dying and quietly lies down beside him, yielding up her life in one final embrace. At this point the surroundings melt from sight and by a king of cinematic magic the real eternity of the lovers' story is brought before the eyes...
...Boston, Iseult is never allowed to reach the dead body of her lover. This type of vulgar censorship does not ruin the film but it does ruin the appetite...
Cocteau has cleverly managed to waken the body of the legend to 20th Century life without rousing its spirit from medieval slumbers. His rattling flivvers and gleaming bathrooms are woven into the fine fabric of the ancient Tristan and Iseult legend like bright new threads into a shadowy old tapestry...