MFAH Film Restorations & Revivals: Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bete)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents the Restorations & Revivals film series. Enjoy these classics from world cinema on the big screen in Brown Auditorium Theater!

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bete)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
1946, in French with English subtitles
France
B/W
93 minutes
DCP

Jean Cocteau’s sublime adaptation of Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy-tale masterpiece—in which the pure love of a beautiful girl melts the heart of a feral but gentle beast—is a landmark of motion picture fantasy, with unforgettably romantic performances by Jean Marais and Josette Day.

The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.

Legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael says, “Perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday family life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty’s farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Dore extravagance of the Beast’s enchanted landscape. Jean Marais is a magnificent beast.”