Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast unspools twice at the Charles' weekend revival series: once at the usual noon screening Saturday and once 12 hours later, at midnight. The honor is apt and deserved - it's a splendorous dream of a movie.
With the clear-eyed, soulful Josette Day as the Beauty and dashing Jean Marais as both her thick-headed village suitor and the gallant Beast, it has picture-perfect casting. Costumed and (in the case of the Beast) made up by Christian Berard, the performers are 18th-century etchings sprung to life with dimensions rarely found in storybook illustrations.
In his behind-the-scenes chronicle, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film (published in 1950, Cocteau wrote that his cinematographer, Henri Alekan, "Achieved a supernatural quality within the limits of realism. It is the reality of childhood." What Cocteau said of Alekan describes his own uncanny artistry.
As the director and scenarist, Cocteau fills the familiar tale with an elating, sometimes vehement magical poetry that conveys the way uncorrupted youngsters experience storytelling and the world. Metaphors and similes become literal in the most light-fingered manner. In the Beast's castle, the walls may not have eyes, but they do have arms and hands, holding candles that illuminate Beauty's path. The fireplace has two spookily animated heads - mute chaperones observing the odd couple's stately courtship.
The Beast is a predatory Puss 'n' Boots. He can't hide primal impulses: His whole face twitches and swerves when he sniffs game, and his body smokes after the kill. He's overcome with abash- ment before Beauty. She pities, then loves him.
Kids who've seen the rousing Disney version won't feel as if they're watching a repeat. The cartoon, with its sex-role jokes and music-hall turns, is giddily, entertainingly anachronistic. Cocteau keeps his aesthetic distance. He casts the kind of spell that can emerge only from the era marked "Once Upon a Time."
Admission: $5. Information: 410-727-FILM or www.thechar les.com.
Holiday classics
Sunday marks the Senator Theatre's 12th annual benefit for the Maryland Food Bank. It serves a worthy cause and gives a couple of classics their due in pristine 35 mm prints: Frank Capra's 1946 It's a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, and Brian Desmond Hurst's 1951 version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, featuring Alastair Sim's never-topped rendition of Scrooge.
You've probably seen It's a Wonderful Life on television, but only on the big screen can you fully appreciate the way Capra's irrepressible showmanship puts over his feel for Americana. For my money, there's more genuine emotion in this movie's high-school graduation dance, and in the coyly avid courtship between Stewart's George Bailey and the girl who idolizes him (the strong, sexy Reed), than there is in Stewart's Mr. Smith mooning over the Lincoln Memorial.
Only without commercial interruptions can you savor the full arc of Bailey's journey from victim to hero. The scenes of his boyhood arouse the empathy of the most hard-boiled viewer.
All of us probably remember our first encounters with accidental misfortune and injustice; Capra captures the agony and frustration of those incidents with more acuteness and honesty than there is in any of his other films. And Stewart puts an unexpected edge on Capra's corniness. Bailey is a reluctant rube, angry at being provincial. Stewart conveys the rage under the surface of his dogged humanity.
Sim is just as miraculous as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Comically grotesque at the beginning and inspiringly silly at the end, his performance is a stylish caricature of a man who gets passionate satisfaction from tightness and meanness. But it's also something more.
In Dickens, when Scrooge visits his neglected nephew's Christmas party, the man's wife, whom Scrooge has shunned, sings "a simple air" that melts his heart. In this movie, the "simple air" is "Barbara Allen" - the song that also provides the melodic backdrop to the scenes of Scrooge's late, beloved sister. Sim's shifts of expression as he sees the ballad's plaintive air reflected in his niece's face demonstrate his change of heart even more convincingly than the fat bird he orders for his clerk's Christmas dinner.
Admission is $3 worth of nonperishable food items and/or $3 cash. Food items go to the food bank. It's a Wonderful Life screens at 11 a.m., 3:45 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., and A Christmas Carol at 1:45 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Information: 410-435-1440.
Cinema Sundays
Rabbit-Proof Fence, one of the best movies of 2002, premieres locally this weekend at Cinema Sundays at the Charles. It tells a harrowing true story of Australia in the 1930s, when the government snatched up children of mixed aboriginal and white parentage and transported them to settlement camps that forcibly prepared them for assimilation into nontribal, white mainstream life as domestic workers.
Directed by Phillip Noyce, the movie focuses on three girls who escaped from such a camp. The intensity doesn't let up until the final credit leaves the screen. Bagels and coffee: 9:45 a.m. Showtime: 10:35 a.m. Admission: $15. Information: 410-727-FILM or www.cinemasundays.com.
All things 'Trek'
Muvico's Egyptian 24 Theaters at Arundel Mills plays host to a celebration of all things Star Trek, with actors who have starred in the TV series and films, a "Romulan" wedding and an auction of Trek memorabilia.
Veteran Trek performers Robin Curtis, Spice Williams and Jack Donner will sign autographs beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday in the mall area outside the theater. The wedding is set for noon (you'll need a movie ticket). Information: 443-755-8990