Beauty and the Beast

The poet, painter and film-maker Jean Cocteau made Beauty and the Beast in 1946, as France emerged from the war, and it won the inaugural Louis Delluc Prize. Adapting the eighteenth-century fairy tale, Cocteau set out, in his famous opening title, to ask the audience for that childhood faith — the willingness to believe in magic — that the story requires.

Josette Day is Belle and Jean Marais the Beast, his elaborate makeup taking around five hours to apply each day. Working with cinematographer Henri Alekan, Cocteau realised the enchanted castle through practical wonders — human arms emerging from walls to hold candelabra aloft, caryatids whose living eyes follow the action, doors that open of their own accord — achieving a hand-made surrealism that no digital effect has since surpassed. The images have the grain and strangeness of a dream half-remembered.

Its influence has been vast, acknowledged everywhere from Disney's animated version to the films of Guillermo del Toro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and the American composer Philip Glass later wrote an opera designed to be performed in place of the soundtrack, in sync with the picture. A foundational work of screen fantasy and one of the most beautiful films ever made in France, it preserves intact the tenderness and the unease of the tale it tells — and remains, decades on, genuinely magical rather than merely charming.