There may be universal agreement that Paris and San Francisco are everyone's
favorite cities, but the best of friends can part ways if they start
discussing favorite movies.
Narrow the field down to preferred fantasies, however, and two titles will
probably surface on which there's a meeting of minds:
Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast,
and Alexander Korda's 1940 The Thief of Bagdad.
They seem to reward revisiting to an unusual degree; at least, I have seen
them so many times that I've lost count.
Still my affection for them remains undiluted, even when repeated viewings
(especially of the Korda picture) are reminders that an object of admiration
may be flawed.
There is another reason for considering and comparing these particular films:
They are excellent examples of two different yet traditional approaches
to that classic form of storytelling - the fairy tale.
My definitions, for our purposes here: Myths and legends predate written
history, direct their stories to adults, and imply an ancient reality,
often with different physical laws than the present;
fables anthropomorphize creatures for didactic purposes;
fairy tales, utilizing extraordinary effects, are devised by
adults for children, and attain cultural permanence to the extent
that they reflect widely shared (perhaps unconscious) views of life.
Initially, we absorb and enjoy fairy tales as children.
Yet they retain a strong emotional attraction for us as adults,
whether we admit it or not, with their visualizations of "everyday"
lives affected by remote, usually malevolent, sources of power.
This power is equated with the possession of "magic" -
devices and techniques unknown or unavailable to the protagonists.
In other words, the structure of fairy tales is based on a class-conflict
situation:
the ordinary individual versus a set of rules, imposed from "above",
whose patterns are incomprehensible, arcane and immutable.
For the child, fairy-tale villains - elves, magicians, ogres, giants and,
of course, evil kings and queens - are grownups; the stories, as
Bruno Bettelheim suggests, do not so much remove the child from reality
as offer reassurance that, in time, the menace of others can be controlled
or at least neutralized.
In the true fairy tale (if I may establish a dictum) the protagonist
is successful through action ... the "child" must go somewhere, or
undertake some activity, that will provide a means of improving life,
solving problems, re-establishing peace.
This definition eliminates the Cinderella type of story, in which no
one has to do anything
- just wait for an outside force to put all in order with but a
few momentary setbacks.
As children grow up, their images of Santa Claus are
converted into a concept of voluntary benevolence and sharing ("Yes,
Virginia ..."), if only once a year, but who knows how many lives have been
warped by the promise of a Fairy Godmother appearing, when life is blackest,
to waft us from the below-stairs ashpit to the royal ballroom?
No, the pure fairy tale, although it may promise material wealth at the
end of the rainbow, presents an engaged protagonist actively seeking a
solution to difficulties created by the "higher-ups" and their cryptic
decrees.
The conclusion involves magic - thereby differentiating this genre
from adventure stories - and may consist of fight or flight.
And now let's be specific.
Its necessary first, I think, to rattle off some bare-bones background
information on Beauty and the Beast and The Thief of Bagdad,
and to synopsize their plots so we all have fresh recollections to consider.
Film was never Jean Cocteau's primary interest, but there are some of us
who feel this poet/playwright/painter was at his best in his three
"fantastic" movies: Blood of a Poet (1930), Beauty and the Beast
and Orpheus (1950).
His other, realistic films bored me to tears; since they're
not pertinent here anyway, I'm glad to pass them by.
I'll also resist the temptation to digress into a comparison of the
three pictures cited, or comment on how Orpheus' most celebrated
statement ("Astonish us") has been consistently quoted out of context
and thereby misinterpreted.
To the matters at hand:
Beauty and the Beast was photographed by Henri Alekan, well known
for many French films, Topkapi, Lady L and the 1968
Mayerling remake; its music was by Cocteau's frequent collaborator,
Georges Auric, also responsible for the score of John Huston's 1952
Moulin Rouge
(lovely compositions bowdlerized by Percy Faith and other pop-music meddlers);
and, as Cleve Canham once said in Audience,
"... the makeup for the Beast, by Hagop Arakelian, is one of the masterful
achievements of film." More production data on
Beauty and the Beast are available in Cocteau's book
Diary of a Film
(Dover Press, 1972), so we can move on to a plot summary.
Belle (I prefer the French) is one of a rural merchant's three daughters;
as he leaves home to check on cargoes due at a distant port, the girls ask
that he bring them presents from the city.
Belle only wants a rose, "because they do not grow here."
(Her sisters are no better than you'd expect, and request expensive
stuff.)
Returning on horseback from the port, where he learned that a storm wiped
him out financially, the merchant stumbles into a forest and its magical
castle.
Mysteriously, food and wine are prepared for him, and he sleeps that night
at the dining table.
Leaving the next morning, he remembers Belle's plea, and plucks a
rose from the castle garden.
A terrifying monster appears, says that anything could have been taken
except the flower, and demanding that the merchant, at a later date,
return as prisoner to the castle.
But when the time comes, it is Belle who goes, sacrificing herself for her
father.
Living in the castle, she finds her initial terror softening into a kind
of wary
sympathy for the Beast (who nightly appears and asks her to marry him).
When
she longs to return home, the Beast gives her a leave of absence, but states
that if
she does not keep the visit short, he will die.
She intends to come back to him but,
once at home again, gets suckered into sticking around and doing all the
sisters'
dirty work.
Missing the monster more than she had thought possible, Belle finally
wings it back to his castle and finds him, as he warned, dying.
Meanwhile, her
boyfriend and brother approach the castle with intent to kill the Beast
and steal
his wealth.
They break in just as Belle, confessing love for the Beast and begging
him to live, hears him say, "If I were human, I could do what you ask; but
we
poor beasts who want to show our love can only fall to the ground and die."
At
this moment, a statue of Diana comes to life - a not unusual thing in Cocteau
movies - and sends an arrow through the heart of Belle's burglar boyfriend;
as
he dies, he assumes the Beast's countenance, and voila! the monster
rises as a
gorgeous prince (with the boyfriend's visage) before Belle's astonished
eyes.
She is not too sure she likes the transformation, but accepts it as she
and the
formerly enchanted prince fly off into the clouds.
This has been, I know, a terribly bland recounting of an atmospheric, tricky
and frequently wondrous film.
Forgive me.
But I just wanted to get some of this
construction reminiscence out of the way.
I'll do the same for the Korda picture,
briefly as I can:
I call The Thief of Bagdad a Korda film as the simplest way out of
a
production-credits mess.
Work was underway in 1939, but was
transferred to Hollywood in 1940 because of the war; some of the crew
went along, some didn't, with the result that you can't completely trust
the
screen titles, any publication, or even Andrew Sarris for a precise docket
of who
did what.
Completed in the U.S., the movie won some Academy Awards, but 59
years later people are still arguing over the accuracy of the record.
Michael
Powell is most frequently identified with direction of the film, but Tim
Whelan,
Ludwig Berger and Zoltan Korda are similarly credited.
So I just slide out from
under the weight of this debate, and refer to it as an Alexander Korda film,
since
he did produce it.
There is less controversy in other departments: Lajos Biro and
actor Miles Malleson wrote The Thief of Bagdad; Vincent Korda designed
it,
Miklos Rozsa scored it (some songs are excised in some prints, unfortunately);
and the photography was by Georges Perinal (whose camera credits include
Rene Clair's À Nous la Liberté and Carol Reed's
The Fallen Idol) and
Osmond Borradaile.
Perinal had also been cinematographer on Cocteau's Blood
of a Poet (neat little overlap for me there, eh?) and Cocteau had kind
things to
say, years later, for the photographer's inventiveness under difficult conditions.
Special effects for The Thief of Bagdad were done by Lawrence Butler,
Tom
Howard and Johnny Mills, though only the first received Oscar recognition.
Alright then, the narrative:
A blind beggar and his dog are taken to the residence of a mysterious man.
There, the beggar tells his story: he was once Prince in Bagdad, and
the dog was
a thieving boy.
They met in prison: the boy was there for stealing, the Prince
because he had let his wicked Vizier talk him into "going among your subjects"
in
disguise, whereupon the Vizier threw the "vagrant" in jail and took over
the
kingdom.
Escaping, the prisoners reached a seaport where the Prince glimpsed a
Princess; falling instantly in love, he delayed escape to dabble with her
in her
garden.
The Princess, however, was lusted after by the Vizier who plied her
father the king with magical toys, including a mechanical flying horse.
When the
Vizier caught the lovers trysting, he cast a spell which rendered the Prince
blind
and turned the thief into a dog.
The spell will be in effect until the Vizier gets his
hands on the Princess.
End of flashback.
Deprived of her beloved, the Princess fell into a coma, as such folk are
wont to
do from time to time, and only the presence of her boyfriend can awaken
her.
So
it is the Vizier who has brought the "beggar" to his home, where the Princess
slumbers on.
When the lovers are placed in the same room, the Princess
awakens, the Vizier carts her aboard his ship, the Prince and the dog are
tossed
out.
As the villain finally embraces our heroine, that curse is released: the
boy is
human again, the Prince sighted.
They set out in a small boat to pursue the Vizier,
and this time he calls up a storm that swamps the dinghy and casts its occupants
overboard.
The thief ends up on a beach where he discovers a bottle with a genie
inside.
Freed, the genie is a big help to the boy ... up to a point.
By the time the boy has stolen an "all-seeing eye" gem from an idol's head,
his control over the genie lapses (it was based on that old three-wishes
gimmick), and though the kid is reunited with the Prince in what appears
to be
Utah's Bryce Canyon, they are stranded and the reunion is short-lived.
During a
spat, the boy uses up his last wish sending Prince back to Princess (whose
mind
has been blown by the Vizier's "blue rose of forgetfulness").
Well, folks, as things
now stand we have: Vizier about to marry Princess, Prince scheduled for
beheading in a few minutes, Thief hanging onto a ledge in some Godforsaken
chasm.
But the boy angrily smashes the "all-seeing eye" and is suddenly in a
desert where a tribe of oldsters, announce their liberation from the enchantment
of the gem, greet the thief as their new leader.
They also happen to possess a
flying carpet and an enchanted crossbow; stealing these, the boy goes sailing
into
Bagdad, rescues the Prince and Princess, shoots down the Vizier (as he flaps
away on the horse), and everything is hunky-dory.
The boy, in the final scene, is
made Vizier, but scuttles away on the carpet as everyone laughs.
It was not these plots, with their deliberate familiarity, which enraptured
audiences, but rather the allegories and productions.
And in the case of Thief,
production compensated for quite a few scripting difficulties.
On the next page,
by way of leading into what these movies were saying, take a look
at how they
said it.
Although the success of Douglas Fairbanks'
original Thief of Bagdad in 1923 inspired Korda's
remake, the two versions are so dissimilar in style
that comparisons are out of the question.
Writers
Biro and Malleson had to start practically from
scratch - not only because they had color and
sound at their disposal, but because they didn't
have a hero figure of Fairbanks' quality and
stature.
Sabu Dastiger, lithe enough at 16, still could
hardly be expected to match Fairbanks' muscle
(though Fairbanks was 40 when making his
Thief) or his acting experience: Sabu had but two
films to his credit at the time - Robert Flaherty's
Elephant Boy and Korda's The Drum.
Could
the movie center, then, on the Prince and
Princess? Nope, not when the roles were played by John Justin - blue-eyed
and
shiningly handsome, but an acting lightweight - and June Duprez, with only
a
few movies under her belt.
These actors looked right (especially Sabu and
Duprez) but could not carry an expensive picture.
Korda had, however, an artistic ace in the hole: Conrad Veidt, who had started
acting in German silents (The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari) and was a popular
performer in England and the United States by 1939.
Veidt had only four years to
live (a heart attack was to kill him in April of '43), and in re-forming
this fairy tale
around him, Korda supplied the actor with what some consider his most
memorable role, Caligari and Casablanca notwithstanding.
Veidt opened the
new Thief, brooding over the shipyard set, and throughout the film
his image,
dark and hypnotic, supplied the mortar of sheer presence to hold things
together.
He became, in effect, the main character, and what was lost in audience
identification with the titular leads was gained in fascination with this
cloaked and
turbaned king of devils.
Having this firm central figure, Korda was free to surround the others with
a battery of special effects to keep their scenes from degenerating into
fluff:
There was the misty, echoing chamber in which Sabu reprised his song
I Want To Be a Sailor before battling a giant spider (over the years,
the
chamber vanished from some prints, though the spider remained - usually);
the large, Siva-like doll that kills Miles Malleson, the Princess' father;
ex-physician Rex Ingram, another movie veteran, carving a permanent niche
into every viewer's
memory as the "noisy," untrustworthy genie; and one hunk of ultra-romantic
dialogue that sneaked its way into a couple of later films (like the Turhan
Bey
Arabian Nights in 1942).
With these engaging overlays, we willingly overlooked
the Prince's terminal naivete and the fact that this vacuous Princess hardly
seemed worthy of her father's edict that whoever looks upon her shall be
killed.
With mechanical cleverness, rich color, sumptuous costumes, gleaming sets
and
a whole textbook of optical maskings, mattes and superimpositions (since
bettered, but splendid for the time), Korda managed - even while turning
a fairy
tale topsy-turvy by making its villain the sole interesting character -
to persuade
us to eat it up.
Cocteau, however, accomplished this and more without the sets,
color, costumes and laboratory equipment: He could only use, in the main,
his
advanced knowledge of film and an imagination which may well have been
boosted by the opium he smoked, but he effectively wiped out the fantasy
competition before and since.
In ensuing decades, Korda's film could
occasionally be found at a theater, though often in choppy form; Cocteau's
was
always playing somewhere...entire and uncut.
(Video versions of each appear to
be complete.)
The security of Cocteau's craft lay in his awareness that no amount of an
audience's technical information or second-guessing really destroys the
wonder
of film.
When Josette Day as Belle gets her first look at Jean Marais' Beast, she
does as you and I would do - passes flat out; Marais carries her to a bedroom
and, as they move through its doorway, Belle's simple dress is transformed
into a
shimmering, jeweled gown.
It doesn't take a special-effects buff to see that this
is accomplished by shooting the couple twice - from outside the bedroom
door in
one costume, then from inside in the second costume - and simply cutting
back
and forth between the two angles.
Four shots, one entirely effective bit of magic:
You know how it's done immediately, yet the eye has been utterly charmed
and
convinced.
When, for Blood of a Poet, Cocteau produced one of cinema's most
startling moments - as the poet splashed through a wall mirror - the viewer's
brain registered how the mirror was actually a pool of water photographed
from
overhead (a trick the director rang variations on later, in Orpheus).
The intellect
instantly explains...but the heart has been undeniably enchanted; and that
spell
lasts far longer than the explanation.
So, for Beauty and the Beast, Cocteau devised dozens of tricks dependent
not upon laboratory manipulation, but on cunning camera angles, lighting
adjustments when photographing glass, odd juxtapositions of people and props,
plus some sleight-of-hand by the actors (as when Belle's father hands one
daughter a string of pearls and it turns into rope).
We know, as we watch, that the corridor of candelabras held by human hands
must have been a ridiculous-appearing set to visit, with stepladders full
of
stagehands thrusting their arms through little holes in curtains; that shadows
growing as characters approached the castle door were animated by a moving
spotlight out of camera range; that a wind machine added extra movement
to the
father's violent reaction when served wine by an "inanimate" table decoration...
we know all this at once, and it doesn't matter.
With its transparent effects in the
hands of a superior artist, Beauty and the Beast is the ultimate
expression of
film's inherent power to shortcut through our objectivity and create a world
of
sense impressions we cannot deny...a world where, as Amos Vogel said in
Film
As a Subversive Art (Random House), only the "power of the image, our
fear of
it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real.
Short of closing one's eyes - in cinema,
a difficult and unprecedented act - there is no defense against it."
And what do we have, then? What are they getting at, these two long-lived
films - one made with all the resources of London and Hollywood at its
disposal, the other produced under trying postwar circumstances where
knowledge of light, lenses and editing had to compensate for so much?
We have those two basic fairy-tale solutions to turmoil and injustice: fight
and
flight.
But they are not assigned quite their expected nature.
The Thief of Bagdad's setting is a city state of fierce social injustice:
The
people are oppressed, their only hope the prophecy of a hero, "the lowest
of the
low," who will someday strike down their rulers; the nominative head of
government knows nothing of their plight - his second-in-command runs the
show.
This vizier possesses magic, and magical devices or beings exist
elsewhere, but such power is beyond the claim or understanding of the people.
It
may, however, be stolen and used for good purposes.
Korda's film typifies the "returning home" fairy-tale theme: the
re-establishment of peace and justice.
The System and its mystical rules can be
countered and controlled; a struggle is established, action undertaken,
the
higher-ups eventually felled.
Although the basic conflict is one of social
extremes (powerful wealth versus impotent poverty, with no middle ground),
there are old-time-religion aspects, too: in the prophecy, finally fulfilled
by a
commoner, and in the unrelieved evil of the villain.
(This social status quo is carefully left unchanged at the end of
the picture: A
benevolent ruler has been reinstated, but the state's rich/poor polity abides...a
mark of the time in which the film was made.
Some suggestion of racial elements
would seem to be present, also, with royalty being light-skinned and the
citizenry
dark; but this is not consistent, and may represent merely the exigencies
of
wartime casting.)
So Korda's message is that the meek shall inherit, at least nominally, if
they
are not too concerned with propriety and honesty of method.
Cocteau's movie,
while thematically more complex, ultimately takes the other traditional
fairy-tale
route to a solution: flight.
Although Beauty and the Beast's plot has social overtones - financial
ruin
for the bourgeois family - Cocteau keeps his attention concentrated on
private matters of love and sacrifice: The threat to peace is the loss of
a
father, not of a fortune.
Disaster looms when an odd law is broken in a
strange place (anything but a rose may be removed from the castle).
This law
has a paranoia-inducing quality to it: "I was waiting to get you, and any
excuse
will do." At any rate, Belle sacrifices herself for her father, and then
discovers
that she has nothing to fear but fear itself.
In time, indeed, she cares more for the
monster than for her family.
The climactic regulation imposed on her is a fairly sophisticated twist
for a
fairy tale: If Belle does not return to the Beast after visiting her home,
he will
suffer (the demands of love, even when unrequited).
And then there is Cocteau's
special switch: Belle, having come to see beyond the ogre's frightful appearance
(as we do also), mistrusts the same personality in a beautiful body.
Nevertheless,
she and her newly restored Prince Charming rise into the clouds to live
happily
ever after.
Flight - literally and figuratively.
As e.e. cummings wrote, "There's a
hell of a good universe next door, let's go!"
Korda followed the fairy-tale premise that we can fight the good fight and
return from the realms of magic resolved to improve the lot of our peers;
Cocteau opted for the genre's alternate decision: the best choice for those
with
innocent and loving hearts, after all is said and done, is to get out
.
Both men, of course, were working within certain genre restrictions; Cocteau
reminded audiences of this in a prefatory title asking that they place themselves
in a childlike frame of mind.
Both retained the genre's postulation about power
(magic): some people are born with it, some aren't, and there is no canceling
out
this distinction...except by begging, borrowing or stealing the tools of
the wizard's
(ruler's) trade.
Yet both appealed to - as the phrase goes - children of all ages
either by throwing in fanciful concepts from other stories (Korda) or by
juxtaposing elegance with frightfulness and exploring the meeting ground
between them (Cocteau)...and both approaches mark adjustments to the genre's
precedents.
It's interesting, therefore, to note which filmmaker chose which
conclusion.
Korda, the industrial giant, went for an ending of social contribution
and the correction of wrongs (if we don't examine it too closely); Cocteau,
the
poet, decided on total escape, and let the world go hang.
These have always been the choices offered by the better fairy tales, those
which, unlike The Wizard of Oz and The Blue Bird, resolve
their conflicts one
way or the other.
They are reasonably realistic, even cynical options:
participation in life, and action to improve it, necessitates some degree
of moral
laxity; pureness of heart, and a concomitant ability to see beneath surfaces,
leads
to death or evasion.
The themes are there, have always been there, and we
respond deeply to them even while enjoying the incidents and techniques
in
which they are dressed.
Which theme do we, as children in bed and then adults in the phantasmal
twilight of theaters, take to be most true?
The answer lies in a general acceptance of The Thief of Bagdad as
singularly accomplished entertainment, and of Beauty and the Beast
as art.
© 1999 Audience magazine. All rights reserved.
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