La Belle et la Bête

Featured image for “La Belle et la Bête”
Shown: January 10, 2012 at 6pm

Director : Jean Cocteau

Country : France

Release Date : 1946

Duration : 95 mins

Language : French

Subtitles : Yes

Upon the film’s December 1947 New York City release, critic Bosley Crowther called the film a “priceless fabric of subtle images … a fabric of gorgeous visual metaphors, of undulating movements and rhythmic pace, of hypnotic sounds and music, of casually congealing ideas.”  Cocteau’s fairy tale set standards in fantasy which few other film makers have reached.  The sequences set in the enchanted castle – complete with living statuary and dignified by a Beast at once ferocious, erotic and genuinely tragic – are pure magic.

“Perhaps the most sumptuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales.”  (New Yorker)


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