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 used his famous opening title to ask the audience for the childlike faith, the willingness to believe in magic, that the story requires.

Josette Day is Belle and Jean Marais the Beast, under makeup that took around five hours to apply each day. With the cinematographer Henri Alekan, Cocteau built the enchanted castle out of 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. No digital effect since has bettered this hand-made surrealism, and the images have the grain and strangeness of a dream half-remembered.

Its influence has been vast, 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. It laid the foundations of screen fantasy and is one of the most beautiful films ever made in France. It keeps intact both the tenderness and the unease of the tale it tells, and decades on it is still magical, which is a good deal more than charming.