Beauty and the Beast

Director: Jean Cocteau

1946 / 93min / 35mm

Cocteau, working with art director Christian Bérard, created a Romantic, enchanted vision of 17th-century France for his luxuriant film fairytale, which begins with village maiden Josette Day paying call on the haunted castle of the fabled Beast—the hunky Jean Marais, disappeared beneath a still-unsurpassed make-up job. A movie that through the simplest of effects—slow-motion, the appearance of Day floating through the corridors of the Beast’s castle—casts a spell that holds for the whole of its runtime.