Les Enfants du paradis

Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) opened in 1945, and Jacques Prévert's script was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1947. It was made under the Nazi occupation between 1943 and 1945, which meant working around Vichy censorship and without major Jewish collaborators in the open: Carné's longtime production designer Alexandre Trauner had to be hidden during production, and members of the crew were secretly aligned with the Resistance. Carné and Prévert had already made Le Jour se lève (1939) together, and this film is the high point of their partnership and of French poetic realism before and after the war.

The setting is the Boulevard du Crime in 1830s Paris, the centre of the city's theatre and popular entertainment, named for the staged crimes of the melodramas that played along it. Four men love the same enigmatic, ungovernable woman, Garance (Arletty, in the role of her career): the mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the wealthy Count Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) and the criminal Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand). The film follows their crossing lives over a decade.

Roger Hubert photographed the Boulevard sets, built at scale at the Studios de Nice, and the result is one of the great period reconstructions of 1940s cinema. It is a historical chronicle and a love story, and also a portrait of theatrical life in nineteenth-century Paris, crowded with performers, hangers-on and their audiences. In France its standing is foundational, and it sits at or near the top of almost any canon of post-war French cinema.