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Summary: A most beautiful "Beauty"
Review: I have owned several video and DVD versions of "Beauty and The Beast" and this restored version took my breath away the first time I watched it. It's almost like an entirely new movie, remade shot for shot, it's that much better than any other version I've seen. If you had never seen it before, you would never think it was over 50 years old; it's that clear and unblemished. It's the perfect movie to watch when one needs reminding that falling in love with a perfect physically beautiful person is quite wonderful, but true beauty has nothing to do with the exterior of a person. The movie was made under difficult circumstances and the end result is a true work of art, created at a time when movies were made out of love, not a love for profit. When one watches the movie, your eyes should never miss a second of it. Some scenes in particular are works of art all on their own: the candle sconces on the wall, lighting on their own and moving as they are passed; Belle's father picking the rose, which suddenly becomes illuminated; the first meeting of the Beast and Belle, when she faints; the statue of Diana coming to life; Belle running across the estate after she realizes she loves the Beast. The exteriors were shot on a beautifully decaying French estate. Any person who loves this movie should buy this version and throw all others away.
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Summary: Magical
Review: It's amazing how Cocteau manages to make so much magic better than any computer generated effects. Simple things like glitter in horses tail, a platform on wheels for Beauty's glide down hall, reverse film(he also used in Orpheus)
It reminds me of the magic of Japanese Kabuki theater, where spotlights are candles on long wooden sticks and the oceon is scarves waving about, so much more magical than modern
technology.
I also find Ray Harryhaussen special effects magical.(Jason and the Argonauts, the Seventh voyage of Sinbad)
I also recommend The blood of a poet.
I don't think Cocteau deserved the put down by the surrealists as just a rich boy. I think he was a true artist.( Radiguet thought so.)
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Summary: Cocteau's gift to humanity
Review: Every time you feel bombarded by sleek CGI pics; by too many cardboard paste disney cartoons; by heavy handed plodding dramas; by laugh track desperate comedies; by chemistry-lacking love stories; by gratiutously violent or over-sexed modern films:
Every time your artistic soul has been trashed until you fear for its existence--take out this indescribably beautiful, erotic, spellbinding, metaphysical masterpiece and replenish your soul. The reviewers are right. It's a mystery how Cocteau could weave this spell in 1946 during the immediate aftermath of war, with so little to aid him in his visualization. Surely he was touched by the hand of God, because i dare you to name anyone else who could have achieved this miracle. Thank you Jean.
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Summary: Philip Glass gets tons of standing ovations, Auric none
Review: This magnificent DVD is crowned with legendary composer Philip Glass's "opera" on a separate soundtrack. As you can see from the other reviews, the movie needs no further explanation from me- it's simply magical. Philip Glass's score makes it even more so- full of energy, passion, and beautiful melodies that blow the original score by Georges Auric away. The live production of Philip Glass's opera has toured all over the world to standing ovations and critical acclaim. A big thank you to Criterion for this wonderful DVD. The Glass soundtrack is simply one of the options on this DVD- if you want to listen to a far inferior and boring soundtrack, simply select the original soundtrack in the menu. Glass rules!
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Summary: How every fairy tale should look
Review: I don't know where to begin this review. I saw the movie a couple years ago based on some kind reviews I read and I had to buy it and rewatch it immediately. This the sort of movie I feel everyone should see, no matter what their age. It has all the details of a children's story, but it has a depth that any adult should recognize. Plus, the skill that goes into every scene and small special effect is amazing.
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Summary: Exquisite film
Review: Cocteau's vision of Mme.LePrince de Beaumont's wonderful story is a sight to behold and cherish.Wildly romantic, tender-hearted, filled with astounding "special effects,"...this film will astonish you in it's beauty. There are scenes in this film that will stay with you forever because of the incredible direction and cinematography.
I cannot praise this film enough.To be able to watch it on this restored DVD version now is a dream come true for all admirers of Cocteau.Buy this DVD.You will treasure it forever. The new DVD comes with a booklet that not only has a lot of information on the filming,and the director and actors,it also has the story itself,in English for anyone who has not read it yet.
Rating:
Summary: Georges Auric 10 Philip Glass 0
Review: "La Belle et la Bête" is unquestionably one of the finest films ever made. I have owned the Criterion DVD since it came out in 1998 and was a little weary about getting the second Criterion DVD of the same movie in just five years. I was wrong: the second DVD is better and here's why. I features the 1995 official, estate-approved, European mechanical and digital restoration of the French master picture and sound negative as opposed to a half-hearted, image-only, American restoration of an American master of the film (the introduction and titles are different from the French version). The 1995 restoration not only did away with practically all artefacts, it restored the movie's sheen, contrast, brilliance, stability and rhythm. The sound is greatly enhanced and free of pops and hisses (2.0 mono digital on this disc, as opposed to 1.0 mono digital on the previous one), even though some distortion in a very loud musical passage (Belle putting on the glove for the first time) was absent from the U.S. print. Also, some missing frames from the French print, which the French redid digitally, were always present on the U.S. print (restorers should talk to each other more often but copyright law is probably involved here). There is a second commentary that is more to the point than the previous one (also offered) and the documentaries and interviews (4 in all, including a restoration documentary and 1995 interviews with the surviving members of the cast and crew) are all French-made and a marked improvement over the 60's, American-made, slightly embarrassing "after-school special" of the preceding version. Finally, this new DVD offers as an optional track Philip Glass' (ahem) opera reprising the film's French script. As an opera lover, even one seeing the distinct possibilities of "La Belle" as a lyric piece, I really would like to say this opera pays homage to Cocteau's words, on some level. But the reality is that I find Mr. Glass' minimalist work tedious and abysmally inept. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It make one appreciate the French comedians' natural delivery and opulent expression all the more, as well as Cocteau's occasional use of silence to create mystery. The opera's French lyrics are horribly mangled in pronunciation, delivery, metre and a little something the French like to call "tonic accent", which is totally missing. A Yankee wrote this opera and George Gershwin he ain't! I don't care how much you are enamoured of the supposed avant-garde, there comes a time when one has to turn the page, musically speaking. I think there should be a special circle of Hell dedicated to Mr. Glass' endlessly repetitive creations. As a Frenchman, I could not decipher one fourth of the words even knowing the script by heart. The singers' diction is actually insulting not only to the script but to the French language in general. Couldn't this production afford a French-language coach? Other negative points: the synchronization of the singing with the actors' mouths is only approximate and comes at the price of shortening some of Cocteau's best lines (the opera comes with its own subtitles). This opera is by necessity comprised of recitatives interspersed with orchestral passages and devoid of arias. As recitatives go, these are rather lifeless and predictable affairs. Also missing are the humour and vitality of the comedy scenes, the sound effects and, most of all, Georges Auric's immortal music. Auric had a hundred times more on the ball, harmonically and melodically, than Glass ever will. His music seems to come out of the night air and return there when it's done and is always surprising even after one hundred hearings. Glass' score is what could be wickedly called "duotonic" for lack of a better word, since it seems to be based on the same two notes and the same two arpeggios (recycled from his score to the 1931 "Dracula"). Glass' feeble attempts at sound effects, furthermore, are ludicrous, e.g.: Belle's first running away to join the Beast, a day-for-night scene, that Glass transforms into daytime with the use of jolly, insomniac, totally out of place, chirping birds. On the plus side: replacing the single voice of Belle's door and Belle's mirror with a male chorus was a good idea musically, but hardly worth the price of admission. What would have been a marvellous idea is to provide on an extra track a totally synchronized version of Swiss conductor Adriano's complete reconstruction and recording of the original Auric score in 5.1 stereo. It could also have been either isolated or synchronized with the dialogue and effects track, assuming this isolated track does exist, which it probably doesn't. But if you need a confirmation of Cocteau's and Auric's genius, I couldn't recommend a better tonic than this DVD which offers a look at what "La Belle" could have sounded like without Josette Day's magical, enchanting voice and Jean Marais' multilevel interpretation of the Beast. No couple ever made better-sounding music, with or without an orchestra.
Rating:
Summary: Luminous, magical, deeply moving film; superb DVD
Review: Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) is not only one of the greatest films I have seen - a perfect blend of poetic fantasy and psychological depth - it's also one of my all-time favorites. The restored version from the Criterion Collection is among the best DVDs I have seen, both for the breathtaking clarity of the image and sound, and for a wealth of supplemental materials, including several fascinating documentaries, essays in a lavish printed booklet, and Philip Glass's complete opera synched to the film on a separate audio track. With each re-viewing of Beauty and the Beast, I see new layers of Cocteau's vision. As a child, I was enthralled by how real, and actually lived in, this fairy tale world seemed. And I was spellbound by the Beast, brought fully, both horribly and tenderly, to life by Jean Marais' riveting performance. I will never forget the Beast's death scene, when Marais expresses worlds of pain, love, and self-understanding solely through the eyes peering out of a feral, hair-covered face. The film does not need today's digital special effects; it still works perfectly with its own low-tech but deeply resonant wonders. And it is a triumph of design. Cocteau worked closely with production "illustrator" Christian Bérard and cinematographer Henri Alekan to give the picture what he called "the soft gleam of hand-polished old silver." It is filled with simple but gorgeous - and unforgettable - tableaux, from a corridor of disembodied human arms grasping candelabra that burst into flame as you pass by, to Beauty gliding in slow motion through the enchanted castle. Then there is the indefinable magic of the scene at the manor with huge white sheets drying in the sun, creating silhouettes of striking power. (Cocteau's crew spent weeks searching everywhere for sheets without patches, an almost unheard of luxury in postwar France.) Technically, and aesthetically, it is astonishing how Cocteau wrested so much visual interest from a film comprised almost entirely of medium shots. A close look reveals how dynamically, yet subtly, unbalanced most of the compositions are. We rarely see a subject head on, but rather from a slightly skewed angle. And during some of the most important moments, Cocteau foregrounds an unimportant object (a candlestick, a tree branch) to block our view, to make our imaginations fill in the obscured main details. Throughout he also makes evocative use of shadows, both where you would expect them, in the Beast's mysterious realm, and where you might not, in the merchant's strangely foreboding manor house. This tense visual quality meshes perfectly with the film's complex emotional nature. On one level, Beauty and the Beast is a perfect, and largely faithful, realization of a great fairy tale, originally written in 1756 by French author Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont while she served as a governess in Scotland. But Cocteau's film exists on many other levels as well, which is why it continues to appeal as much to adults as children. There have been many interpretations, including symbolist, Jungian, Freudian, deconstructionist, and even gay readings (Cocteau is not only a preeminent author, poet, artist, playwright, and filmmaker of the 20th century, he is also a central gay icon). All of these views help reveal the many, and sometimes contradictory, layers of Cocteau's vision. At its simplest and most direct, the film paints a moral lesson as easily understood by a child as by most adults: Who and what you are - your true nature - matters more than your appearance. We see this idea embodied, in troubling ways, by many of the human characters, including Beauty's two wicked sisters and, to a lesser extent, her wastrel brother Ludovic. But the most morally ambiguous character, and the one who gives the film considerable emotional depth, is Avenant. He is, of course, played by Jean Marais, who also performs the Beast and, at the end, Prince Ardent. Avenant is strikingly handsome, self-assured, and energetic, yet Marais also brings out his darker side, subtly in his attempted seductions of Beauty and overtly in his fatal greed at the end. What compounds Avenant's resonance for the film comes out in one of the final lines. Beauty answers Prince Ardent's question about whether she loved Avenant with a breathless, "Oh yes!" How, and why, could our heroine - who comes to see through the Beast's fearsome persona to the torn yet righteous man within - ever have been in love with someone like Avenant? That is yet another of the film's emotional mysteries, the ones which may appeal more to, and perhaps even unsettle, adult viewers. One of the most fascinating, and visceral, comments on this film is musical. Composer Philip Glass (whose works include the operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and The Voyage, and film scores Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, and The Hours) set Cocteau's screenplay to music which runs simultaneously with the picture on the DVD, as the composer intended. The film's original, magisterial score by Georges Auric is one of cinema's greatest; and Cocteau knew exactly when to use it - or silence - for maximum effect. But Glass uses his patented syncopated rhythms and repeated symmetrical sequences of chords to create a haunting alternate voice for the picture. Distinct from Auric, Glass's score reveals the sometimes dark and disturbing emotional subtext, rather than the fairy tale sense of wonder. Previously I had liked the opera as an audio recording; but when joined with the film I found it utterly compelling. Beauty and the Beast is a film I look forward to reexperiencing for the rest of my life. It has a way of getting under your skin, even entering your dreams. The closer you look at it, the more mysterious, and spellbinding, it becomes.
Rating: 
Summary: No more beastly scratches
Review: The Criterion Collection has released its second DVD version of Cocteau's masterpiece, this time featuring the extensive 1995 Luxembourg restoration done for French cinema's centennial. The black-and-white film, mono, in French, comes in its original aspect ratio of 1:33.1. The restoration -- detailed on the DVD -- removed most of the scratches and dropouts that plagued the original nitrate negative. While viewers will marvel at the quantum leap in video integrity and continuity, owners of the 1998 Criterion DVD may want to hang on to their discs. Missing in action from the 2003 version -- which appears a bit flat after all that scrubbing -- are the dramatic contrasts of the previous restoration, done in the United States. (The older DVD presentation bears major scratches throughout -- pick your poison.) Regardless, the new "Beast" DVD comes with significant upgrades over previous U.S. video versions. The notoriously bad audio loses almost all of its persistent scratchiness and lack of dynamics -- giving the "Beast" back his roar. The English subtitles benefit from much-needed care in translation and presentation. Another notable change is the resurrection of Cocteau's original opening -- the live-action titles in which the stars' names are hastily written on a blackboard and the director's handwritten message to the audience. Modern-day composer Philip Glass' "Beauty and the Beast" opera -- usually performed live as Cocteau's movie plays as a silent film -- comes on an optional audio track, in Dolby Digital 5.1. There's an undeniable thrill in having "Beast" unspool as Glass' hypnotic music swirls around the room, but the replacement of the original actors' dialogue with opera singers' wailing quickly wears thin. The opera comes with its own set of subtitles. The new DVD carries over the 1991 commentary by film historian Arthur Knight that appeared on the original Voyager laserdisc and on the 1998 DVD. The talk is informative, but one gets the feeling Knight would rather be talking about the director's first film, the avant-garde "Blood of a Poet" (1933). Bringing a fresh second opinion to the disc is cultural historian Christopher Frayling, whose talk is as good as it gets in academic film commentary. (Sir Christopher's track was recorded in 2001 for the British Film Institute.) Frayling greatly admirers Cocteau's film but doesn't hesitate to point out weaknesses. Unlike Knight, Frayling stays on topic, moving scene-to-scene with the film but never wasting time with the obvious.
Rating:
Summary: GEORGE AURIC'S SCORE
Review: That Criterion would lavish two separate editions on Cocteau's masterpiece says a great deal about this company and their love for this film. And this restored edition of Beauty and the Beast has many joys -- not the least of which is the up-until-now rarely seen "chalkboard" opening sequence (which was substituted for a different title sequence in American prints). So it is disappointing, if not a little mystifying, that Criterion would include an "alternate" score by Phillip Glass. Mr. Glass' opera, composed 30 years after Cocteau's passing, has nothing to do with the restoration and preservation of Jean Cocteau's great film; it simply has no place here. Given the otherwise beautiful presentation from Criterion, it is too depressing to speculate on the reasons for this unfortunate inclusion. It might be said that the greatness of this film comes not simply from Cocteau's isolated genius, but rather from the unprecedented degree to which Cocteau truly collaborated with other great artists. GEORGE AURIC'S SCORE is not only one of the finest film scores ever composed (in terms of how it perfectly complements and counterpoints every other aspect of the film), but it also, in and of itself, is a thing of rare and sustaining beauty. Of GEORGE AURIC'S SCORE Cocteau said, "The music is wedded to the film; it impregnates it; exalts it; consummates it. The Beast's spell puts us to sleep and the spectacle of this penumbra of sound is the dream within our sleep". .... The restoration of the original film, technically, is apparently about as good as it can get; the over-all DVD presentation is handsome; and the "extras" all out-shine the ones included in the earlier edition. It is worth purchasing if only to see recent color footage of many of the original exteriors, many of which feature the elderly Jean Marais (the Beast) and the extraordinarily beautiful Mila Parély (Adélaïde).
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