Perhaps the most amazing thing about Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) is the fact that he produced it under the worst possible film-making conditions, yet managed to create a movie that continues to influence other film-makers and remains a treat to watch.

In post-war France, fresh film was hard to find so Cocteau made do with what he could get, including some that was damaged. He would have preferred to film the story in color, but the black and white production has a charm that would not exist in color. Light and shadow take the place of color in conveying the magic of the tale of the beautiful girl who must go to live with a hideous beast.

Materials for props and settings were also scarce. For example, the scene in which the characters move among billowing sheets drying on clothes lines required an exhaustive search to find sheets that had not been patched. The Beast's palace and the avenue of stone animals are not film sets. Cocteau found an estate on which those features already existed.

Cocteau's film closely follows the version written by Mme Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. A wealthy merchant loses his fortune when his ships are lost at sea. In Mme de Beaumont's version he has six children, three sons and three daughters. Cocteau pares the family to three daughters and one son. The son, a gambler, makes his father's situation worse by running up debts. Belle's sisters are lazy and vain and resent having to cut expenses by going to live in the country.

Jean Marais plays three parts, that of Belle's unworthy but handsome human love interest Avenant, the Beast, and the Prince who materializes at the death of the Beast.

Belle is played by Josette Day, who is truly exquisitely beautiful.

Insead of printed credits, we see a hand writing names on a battered school chalkboard. The hand then writes a brief message in which Cocteau asks his viewers to suspend their adult attitudes and adopt the thinking of a child who is able to believe that the plucking of a rose can initiate a series of devastating events. The hand stops writing with the words Il était une fois...(Once upon a time...)

The first scene places us in the fairy tale past by showing us characters dressed in quaint costumes walking past disused sedan chairs.

The father receives news that one of his ships has come in and prepares to go to town. Belle's sisters expect to be able to resume their extravagant life style and ask their father to bring them expensive gifts. Belle asks for nothing until her father insists. She asks him to bring her a rose.

The father goes to town only to discover that in fact the ship has not come in and he is as poor as before. Returning after dark, he becomes lost in the forest and stumbles upon the Beast's palace and the magic begins.

If you've seen Disney's 1991 Beauty and the Beast, you'll recognize the source of the cartoon Beast's costume. The animated candlelabra, wardrobe, and teapot certainly derive from the disembodied torch-bearing arms, wine-pouring hand, and observant statues in Cocteau's film. Next to the 1946 film, however, the 1991 animated film seems flat.

It's said that when Greta Garbo watched the Cocteau film, she was so disappointed to see the Beast replaced by the Prince that she shouted "Give me back my Beast!"

Cocteau deliberately contrived to make the Beast more attractive than the human being who replaced him:

Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible. The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teen-age girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation. They mourned the disappearance of the Beast—

See for yourself. Treat yourself and your family to 93 minutes of film-making at its magical best.