Film Studies

Obituary is a croupier's rake gathering in the dead bets. It moves too quickly to be sentimental, and only waits long enough to spell the names correctly. But this week the paper fell open, and there was Jean Marais dead on one page, and Rumer Godden on the other. Some fragment of melody crossed my head, but I couldn't see how they had ever met or known each other. Then an hour or so later, it dawned on me: theirs were separate stories, but it was story that held them together.

There's no need to spell out two long lives - Marais was 84, and Godden 90 - but they were vital to two movies, two marvels: films from a rapturous moment in history, and experiences that ought to be required of children, like long division, or the naming of the Plantagenets. I'm thinking of La Belle et la Bete (1949) and The River (1951), and of the inexplicable innocence there was in doing movies in the years just after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Jean Cocteau made La Belle et la Bete in 1946. He wrote a book about it, Diary of a Film, that complains about post-war shortages and economies, yet which is full of the bliss in delivering that film's very practical magic. Cocteau had a technical assistant - Rene Clement, a fine director - on the assumption that Cocteau was a genius elsewhere but an amateur with film. He had made one picture before, the "art" film The Blood of the Poet in 1930, but this was his feature debut. It's in black and white, radiantly shot by Henri Alekan, so that the mood of Vermeer turns into Fuseli. But it has home-made special effects - call them faerie - that are still enchanting.

And it has Jean Marais in two roles: as the brave young man, and as the Beast. Marais was Cocteau's discovery, and his lover; he was blazingly blond, square-cut in his features, and a little stolid as himself. But as the Beast! He was like a lion - growling, whiskered, the spirit of mortified love, in that his every hope was ruined by grotesque appearance. You can say - as people say of Boris Karloff in the Frankenstein films - that the performance was all in the make-up. Not so. Marais's Beast wore the make-up as an infernal injury. It was like a skin disease he could not shrug off, causing his every breath and hope to speak of courage and resignation.

The River came five years later. It counts as an American film, though it was directed by Jean Renoir and made with a Bengali crew, and it was adapted by Renoir and Rumer Godden from her own autobiographical novel. Renoir had not worked for four years. He had lost faith in movies: he felt unwelcome back in France, but ill at ease in Hollywood. And he was moved by this story of English people living in India. "Children in a romantic setting," he wrote. "The discovery of love by small girls, the death of a little boy who was too fond of snakes, the rather foolish dignity of an English family living on India like a plum on a peach-tree: above all, India itself."

Not all of India, of course; least of all the politics. This is a film about the rhythm of siesta - the way the camera oozes in and out as it watches people sleeping - about red hair in the glaring sun, and the silly ecstasy and rages of first love. The girls - two English and one Indian (Patricia Walters, Adrienne Corri, Radha Sri Ram) - are moved by a war- torn American who lives nearby. Renoir nearly got Marlon Brando to play that part, and the actor he had to settle for is not Brando. But it doesn't matter. No one knew more than Renoir about using the best of what you had. So little happens, yet you feel the wheel of the world. Renoir was renewed, and he went on to Golden Coach and French Can-Can - three masterpieces to match any three from the 1930s. He was friends with Rumer Godden until he died.

That's not quite all. Here is the real bond between the two: the one is a fairy story, the other a film about children - but neither is that monstrous fallacy we labour under now - a film for children. They both require adult attention. The Beast is awesome; the little boy is killed by the serene cobra. Even in the dark, a child may want to feel that someone older is there - even if something in the films whispers that there is so much that adults cannot stop, or tame.

I hate films made for children. They feel it is safe and right to leave out so much about feelings and reality. Why shouldn't films challenge children to reach out for more than they can yet grasp? We do not have to understand everything, not if we are moved, and if adults are there, regaining their child-like life. Film is often childlike. Its magic sweeps over us like storms we cannot prevent. So we grow closer to our children, as they try to become us. It is a transaction that needs films like La Belle et la Bete and The River; like Meet Me in St Louis, My Darling Clementine, It's a Wonderful Life, Henry V, The Boy With Green Hair, Red River, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, The Fallen Idol, Oliver Twist - all from the years 1944-51 - films so profound that a wise parent needs a child's company.