Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.
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What critics compared Beauty and the Beast to
Visually, the characterization makes a nod to the scowling-eyed Beast from Jean Cocteau’s immortal “Beauty and the Beast” (1946), but he also comes off as a kind of royal version of the Elephant Man: a melancholy freak trapped in solitude.
Largely devoid of imagination, this Beauty And The Beast will likely hit its mark with plenty of viewers—those old enough to get a buzz of recognition from “Be Our Guest” (busily reconceived as a vortex of ones and zeroes) and those too young to know they’re watching a faded copy of last millennium’s family entertainment.
Stevens is one of the best parts of this “Beauty and the Beast” — right up there with Luke Evans’ blustery, conceited Gaston, with Kevin Kline’s doddering father, and with Ewan McGregor’s spastic, ostentatiously French-accented candelabra-man Lumiere.
And the longest section, with that nasty troglodyte, incorporates both one of Carax' earlier works (the same character showed up in his contribution to the 2008 anthology film "Tokyo!") and a bit of Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast."
“Holy Motors” looks forward and backward, combining science fiction with an upended, funhouse mirror history riffing on Cocteau, Bunuel, “Beauty and the Beast,” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and “M,” among many influences.
With its numerous candelabras held by gilded human arms (an idea stolen from director Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast"), stylish full-length mirrors and translucent drapes, however, they might as well be in the basement of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
The staging is generally indifferent, save for a few scattered shots that prove Schumacher had seen Moulin Rouge! sometime in the three years since its release, and the utterly tacky lift at the start of the garish, over-lit "The Phantom of the Opera" sequence that proves he'd also seen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast , and inaccurately assumed that he had earned the right to lick that film's taint, let alone pilfer one of its most famous images.
And for that matter, there are clearly intentional references to Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
There are moments when the movie seems desperate to approach the lyric surrealism of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell's ''The Red Shoes" and Jean Cocteau's ''Beauty and the Beast," the foulness of Dario Argento's own Faustian ''Phantom" adaptation, or, at least, the insanity of Brian De Palma's ''The Phantom of the Paradise."
After sweeping down a corridor of arms holding candelabras (see Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast"), the Phantom leads the girl onto a gondola to bring her to his candlelit grotto.
The best parts of “The Shape of Water,” a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.
Doug Jones: the secret creature, thought a god by the villagers from whose land he was torn, akin to the “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” but also the beauty and the beast from the myth, especially Jean Cocteau’s 1946 “Beauty and the Beast.”
Guillermo del Toro’s new horror-fantasy The Shape of Water gives striking, at times unsettling, and at other times deeply moving form to Williams’s argument, building from a long line of classic horror and fantasy films ranging from The Phantom of the Opera (1927), to King Kong (1933), to Beauty and the Beast (1946) about tortured romances between misunderstood monstrosities and the women who come to love them.
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For a children's movie, Maleficent makes one hell of a Vogue pictorial, eschewing the breakneck pacing expected of a PG Disney flick for the stern, art-house rhythms of Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast.
Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” vs. Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”?
The Faun/Pan (Doug Jones, Hellboy) even speaks in much the same manner as the Beast (Jean Marais) in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946).
Haunted by nightmares of rape and violation, she hallucinates arms coming out of the two walls of her hallway (a steal from Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast").