Just one of my all-time favorite classic films. I could write about this movie forever and ever, especially since I first saw it in a film studies summer course I took at Rutgers, and we learned all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes trivia. For instance, there's a scene in the movie where Belle's family is doing laundry and there are maybe 40 or so white sheets all hanging on the lines. It creates a really visually interesting background for her homecoming (after she has been living at Beast's digs in the forest for a while and cries until she can go home because she thinks Dad is dying... man up Belle! Or don't. It's your life, I guess.). But during the course we learned about how Jean Cocteau, the director of this movie, made it very soon after the end of World War II and it actually took them months to rustle up that many untorn, unstained white sheets for the scene because so many had been ruined by or donated to the war effort.
Or! Like how the star, Josette Day, was deathly afraid of horses. So for the scene where she is supposed to be riding Beast's magic horse (that's what she said?), Le Magnifique, to his castle, they show her briefly whispering the magical incantation or whathaveyou in Magnifique's ears, and then an eeeextremely long shot, from overhead, of her progress through the woods, wherein you can never see her face. Because it's not her! They used a double for every other horse scene she's supposed to be in and found an interesting runaround, plot-wise, for the end, so that she didn't have to ride the horse again in order to return home.
Okay I really set out not intending to write all that down but I can't help it. That this movie was made at all is just as impressive as the final product, which is a beautiful, romantic, extremely FRENCH in the Amélie/Jules et Jim kind of way and not in the no more headscarves/we're culturally better than you kind of way, funny, at times kind of ribald take on the classic tale. I usually try not to post this many pictures with my movie posts but when it comes to La Belle et La Bête it cannot be helped, and even posting this many is showing a lot of restraint on my part. If I could I would probably screencap about every 15 seconds of this film for the whole world's enjoyment, because that's how pretty of a film it is. But I'll leave it here, I suppose, and just to reiterate: I love this film. I love its costumes. I love the brother, Ludovic, who ruins everyone's lives repeatedly and still somehow manages to be one of the most likable characters. I love the sisters who are hilariously the worst. I love the Beast, who is so weird and over the top dramatic and does all these pseudo-animal mannerisms and whose makeup is NOT GREAT but because it's not great it is kind of great? Does that make sense? It is great in the way that only special effects makeup for movies made in the 1940's can be. I love all the other special effects, especially some of the stuff Cocteau does in the castle, which I think is still legitimately cool-looking, even today. I love the sets. I love the simplicity of the story.
So, yeah. I like this one.
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