LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES -- The Criterion Collection / $39.95
As a collaboration between an established master of French cinema (writer Jean Cocteau) and one of its rising stars (director Jean-Pierre Melville), 1950's Les Enfants Terribles is a landmark film that has been eagerly studied, analyzed and picked apart for decades. But watching this extraordinary film should never be regarded as simply an academic exercise: It's too rich, too endlessly fascinating, too singular for that.
Based on Cocteau's sensational and best-selling 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles unveils the story of teen siblings Elisabeth and Paul, whose relationship seems incestuous (some argue that it stops just short of that, though a close viewing of the film suggests otherwise), and defiantly odd. The two inhabit a self-created world, complete with its own rules - they call it simply "the game" - and heavily restricted access. Those who do force their way in, who try to play by rules only Elisabeth and Paul understand, do so at their own emotional peril.
On the heels of a rapid-fire drumbeat that immediately calls the audience to attention, the film opens with Paul (Edouard Dermithe) being felled by a snow-covered rock thrown by the unscrupulous (and androgynous) Dargelos (Renee Cosima), a recurring character in several of Cocteau's works. Bedridden with a weak heart, Paul is cared for by the complicated Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane). As the film progresses, the two struggle to retain exclusive emotional rights to each other, even as outside forces - embodied by Paul's classmate Gerard (Jacques Bernard) and Elisabeth's fellow model, Agathe (Cosima again) - try forcing their way into "the game."
Cocteau, whose films as director included Beauty and the Beast (1946) and The Eagle With Two Heads (1948), long said he had no wish to bring Les Enfants Terribles to the screen. He changed his mind when two things happened. Melville, coming off the success of his first feature, 1949's near-wordless war drama Le Silence de la Mer, agreed to direct. And Cocteau met Stephane, who looked remarkably like some drawings he had made for the book.
How much of the film is the work of the existentialist Cocteau (who wrote the screenplay and voiced the narration), and how much came from the more lyrically minded Melville? Who's to say? Best to simply enjoy the extraordinary result of this collaboration, a movie Francois Truffaut charmingly referred to as "a concerto for four hands."
Special features
Commentary from writer Gilbert Adair; interviews with Stephane, Bernard, producer Carole Weisweiller and assistant director Claude Pinoteau; "Around Jean Cocteau," a short look at the creative relationship between Cocteau and Melville.
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SUSPENSE: THE LOST EPISODES, COLLECTION No.1 --Infinity Entertainment/Falcon Pictures / $39.98
From 1949 to 1954, Suspense ran as a 30-minute anthology series on CBS. Broadcast live, the show featured a mix of stars both established (Boris Karloff, Jackie Cooper, Joan Blondell) and then-unknown (Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger) in dense little vignettes that reflected, to varying degrees, the series' title. Some 90 episodes of the series, unseen by the public since their original broadcast, turned up in kinescopes recently, and this collection presents 30 of them, complete with vintage commercials. Though marred by dime-store sets (mostly made of cardboard, they tend to move in ways they shouldn't) and the occasional actor who doesn't realize the camera's on him, this collection is an invaluable relic from television's earliest days, when almost everything about the medium was new and untried.
chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com