I hadn’t planned to write about this film. I assumed it was so widely known, and so well loved, that anyone who cared about the theater would already know it was a must-see. But a little inquiry told me a different story: Many people I talked to, including knowledgeable theater lovers, either hadn’t seen it or thought they might have seen it but couldn’t remember. That latter statement can’t apply to Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis). If you don’t remember seeing a movie this big, lavishly spectacular, and brilliant, then you haven’t seen it. Also, I thought of the youngest generation of theater lovers: No matter how passionately they care about the theater, they might well hesitate at the idea of immersing themselves in a black-and-white movie 75 years old in a foreign language. So this message is most of all for them: If you care about the theater and you’ve never seen Children of Paradise, you don’t really know yet what it is you care about. After seeing Children of Paradise, the theater—and life—will look different to you. However you feel about the film itself, it will become a reference point that enhances your sense of what we’re all about here. Everything the theater can do and does can be seen, or at least glimpsed, in Children of Paradise. And you get to see it while sharing one of the world’s great film experiences, with some drop-dead-wonderful performances. Even for a movie as long as Children of Paradise, this is no lousy deal.
And Marcel Carné’s film isn’t short because it needs to be long: It’s an epic—a big, boisterous, romantic story of love and betrayal, in two flamboyant acts with an intermission. Made in France during the Nazi occupation, when all feature films were restricted to 90 minutes in length, it was originally intended to be released as two separate films, but its premiere came only after Paris had been liberated, so it could be shown in full. The first American release version had more than 40 minutes snipped out of it, but even then the film’s greatness was palpable to reviewers. Set in the teeming Paris of the 1830s and ’40s, Children of Paradise has multiple plots that intertwine, giving it the density of one of the era’s great, bulky novels—think Balzac, Victor Hugo, or Alexandre Dumas the elder. And it has, like those great 19th-century novels, a freewheeling tone of outrageous romance as it swings its way from the shabbiest lowlife to the fanciest high life and back again.
Its title doesn’t refer to anything sacred or saintly. The “Paradise” of this film’s children is the poor people’s half-derisive term for the upstairs gallery where every theater’s cheapest seats are located. If you can make a hit with the crowds who flock au paradis to see the show, your theatrical future is assured. They are the most alert and most demanding audience, the quickest to shout their scorn when they see anything fake, and the first and loudest to cheer when something pleases them. They’re a tough crowd any night of the week.
And they are a crowd. The film has many characters, all embodied in memorable and in some cases extraordinary performances, but the mob that gives the movie its name is its main current, a river of humanity on which the people we come to care about are swept along, sometimes against their will. The movie opens with the mob thronging the streets and ends, after much drama, with the characters getting engulfed in it.
That opening moment, by the way, is one of the most celebrated visual tricks in world cinema. I don’t mind giving it away because it is actually more of a coup if you know it’s coming: At the start, you see a theater curtain and you hear, from the unseen stage behind it, the three loud raps of the stage manager’s staff that tell French audiences the performance is about to start. Then the curtain rises—not on a stage set, but on a street mobbed with people, along which the camera immediately starts moving. Your expectations are jolted and reassured at the same time: This will be no stodgy filmed play but an extravagant spectacle full of liveliness, motion, and surprise.
The street, lined with carnival-like attractions and melodrama theaters, is the Boulevard du Temple, known to Parisians of that day as the “Boulevard du Crime” because of the many lurid attractions on view there. The era is the one just before Haussmann’s urban renewal demolished so much of the old Paris. As the camera tracks along the Boulevard, you see tightrope walkers and animal acts working the crowd; you hear the cries of peddlers hawking their wares and barkers pitching their attractions. As if lured by one of the latter, the camera moves, with a crowd of curious men, to see what the barker declares will be “The Naked Truth.” This of course turns out to be a scam—I won’t spoil that surprise by explaining just how—but to make up for the disappointment, you get your first glimpse of Garance (Arletty), who will be the heroine of this multilayered and multi-plotted romance. And through her, when she leaves her job in the sideshow, you will very quickly meet three of the four men who will play major roles in that romance. Most of it will happen along that one bustling street.
Her unusual name, she tells people, is “the name of a flower.” Garance is the French word for a family of climbing or ground-spreading vines with little red flowers, for which the unfortunate English name is madder; its roots have been used for centuries as a source of red pigment for dyeing, painting, and decoration of all kinds. And Arletty’s Garance certainly is both very decorative and—like the vine whose name she bears—extremely hardy. Garance is a survivor: At the movie’s start, she leaves her job. Not long after, she is arrested for a crime she didn’t commit. With a little unexpected help, Garance survives both incidents with aplomb, a pattern that will continue as the story winds on. She is also a magnet: Though clearly strong-minded and self-reliant, she naturally attracts men who feel eager to assist her.
This was true of the actress who played her, too. Arletty, born Leonie Marie Julie Bathiat, had climbed to the top of her profession from threadbare beginnings in a working-class family. Her statuesque beauty got her into modeling and then into the music halls, where her elegantly long limbs and facial features, alluring eyes, and mysterious half-smile made up for her somewhat froggy singing voice. She moved from the music halls to the legitimate stage and by the mid-1930s was an icon of both French theater and film. Children of Paradise was her fourth film with director Marcel Carné and her third with his principal collaborator, screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert.
But this film, like the trio’s previous work together, Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), was being made in Nazi-occupied France. To discuss Arletty’s career brings up something else, an important piece of backstory not about the characters but about the making of the film itself, which has passed into legend. So much so, in fact, that several theater pieces have been created which attempt to combine the film’s narrative with the story of its making. France was a conquered country, though the occupation was steadily crumbling, while the film was being made, as the Allied invasion drew closer and the Germans retreated. It was a time of desperation and shortages, of secrets and betrayals. At the very end of the film’s opening credits, just before that theater curtain goes up, there’s one last title: clandestine collaborators. It lists two major artists whose names could not have appeared publicly on the credits of any film released under the Nazi censorship: set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma. Both were Jews (Kosma was a Communist to boot), and both were in hiding in a country house rented by Carné, its back door convenient to the nearby mountains for a quick escape if the Gestapo came knocking at the front door. Trauner would periodically slip out at night, carrying false identity papers, to supervise the decorating of sets for the next few days’ shooting, and would slip back again before dawn. When daylight arrived, one of his “fronts,” Léon Barsaq and Raymond Gabutti (both valued colleagues with strong track records of their own), would be there to make any last-minute adjustments and sign any official paperwork that might be required. Kosma would come downstairs at night to view the dailies on a Movieola and sketch out the scoring. His front, Maurice Thiriet, was also the film’s orchestrator, so no one except Thiriet ever saw any music written in Kosma’s hand. (In addition to his film scores, Kosma wrote a great many popular songs, mainly with lyrics by Prévert. Probably the best-known over here is “Autumn Leaves.”)
This clandestine work was only a fraction of the secrets that swirled around the making of Children of Paradise. Nobody ratted on Trauner because a good many of the crew, as well as a sizable number of the 1,600 extras the film employed, were Resistance members using their film jobs as a cover; nobody would notice if a carpenter or a few members of the crowd were missing because they were off on a mission. The extras were largely just ordinary people hungry for work as well as for food: An unverifiable story has it that a banquet scene laden with fresh fruit expensively procured on the black market had to be carefully guarded so that the famished extras wouldn’t grab the rare items before the scene had been shot.
There were other dangers as well. Stormy spring weather damaged some of the outdoor scenes, including the large Boulevard du Temple set, which had to be rebuilt. Allied bombing raids sometimes knocked out the electric power, bringing the camerawork to a standstill. Originally financed as a French-Italian coproduction, the film lost a big chunk of its backing when the Allied invasion of Sicily sent Italian banks into a tailspin. (And the threat of Allied invasion via Italy shut down the studios at Nice, where the film had been shooting, necessitating a move back to Paris, where supplies were scarcer and work permits more closely monitored.) Producer André Paulvé discreetly withdrew when the Nazis started inquiring about his possible Jewish ancestry, and the production was taken over by the Pathé company, which meant a whole new set of bureaucratic hurdles for Carné. The surging romance on the screen was underpinned by very real threats to those busy depicting it.
And you never knew who might be a potential informer. One actor well-known for his Nazi sympathies was Robert Le Vigan, who played the surly old-clothes man and fence, Jéricho. A familiar voice on the German-sponsored radio station, he decided to take it on the lam when, after the Allies’ D-Day landing in Normandy, he heard that the Resistance had sentenced him to death for collaboration. He and the pro-Nazi novelist Céline escaped over the border to Germany, hiding in bombed-out or deserted châteaux on their way. (Céline later described their journey in his harrowingly funny novel Castle to Castle.) After Le Vigan’s flight, his scenes had to be reshot with the actor Pierre Renoir taking on the role of Jéricho at the last minute. (One of Le Vigan’s scenes, in which you only see his back, remains in the film.)
And then there was Arletty. During the occupation, the simplest way for a beautiful woman to obtain black-market goods was also the one French males found most infuriating: by sleeping with a German officer. Arletty’s involvement with a Luftwaffe officer was well-known. (One unverifiable account alleges that they met when he was assigned to command the guards watching over the ancient château where Arletty was shooting her previous Carné-Prévert film, Les Visiteurs du Soir. One of her biographers also asserts—I don’t know on what evidence—that she became pregnant by the officer, and interrupted the shooting of Children of Paradise to abort his child, not bothering to inform him of the fact.) Her appearance as the apostle of liberty in Children of Paradise did not make her relationship sit any better with the Resistance diehards who instigated the postwar retribution on collaborators. Being Arletty, she was spared the humiliation of being paraded through the streets with her head shaved, but she was imprisoned for a while—she missed the film’s premiere because she was under arrest—and also briefly restricted from working in film. This didn’t faze her; at her trial she is supposed to have said, “My heart belongs to France but my ass is my own.” (Other sources give “My heart belongs to France but my ass is international.”) Barred from film, she went back to the stage; it was during this period that Jean Cocteau adapted Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to star her and his lover Jean Marais. (A photograph of them in the rape scene used to be among those in the standard U.S. paperback edition.)
Children of Paradise has the fullness of a really good evening of live theater, and theater, from street performance to Shakespeare, is its entire subject. Perhaps more to the point, it gives a sense of life itself being essentially theatrical, as when Lacenaire pulls back the drapes in Lemaitre’s green room to reveal an unexpected sight on the balcony outside. The film is also rich with theater history: Though the characters’ interactions are largely screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s invention, several of the key figures are historical, including the great mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, commonly known by his stage name, Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), and one of France’s most celebrated Shakespearean actors, Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur). The egomaniac criminal Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) is also a historical figure, flamboyant enough to rank as a theatrical personage in his own right. The three of them were alive at the same time, and Prévert poured a great deal of factual material from their lives and works into his story.
Deburau (1796–1846) did indeed play a white-faced Pierrot, and Mayo’s costume for Barrault in the film reproduces one that Deburau’s Baptiste is often seen wearing in 19th-century prints. And his theater, the Funambules, did indeed stage a pantomime in which Pierrot kills an old-clothes man. The facts on that event are hazy: Deburau himself may not have been the Pierrot who played it. But let us leave that debate to theater historians. The main point is that Deburau’s theater became a sensation, and the era’s writers enshrined him in history as an icon of his silent art. He was so romanticized that the story of this particular mime, invented by one of his intellectual admirers, the poet Theophile Gautier, got handed down so that later artists tried to recreate it half a century after Deburau’s death.
And nearly a quarter-century after that, in 1918, the playwright and actor Sacha Guitry used the mime with the old-clothes man as the apex of his lavish stage biography, Deburau, which David Belasco turned into an even more lavish production for Broadway in 1920, in a translation by Harley Granville Barker, with the title role played by Lionel Atwill, later famous for playing mad scientists in cheesy horror movies.
So Deburau’s fame had persisted, linked to the image of this pantomime in which he might never have appeared. Carné and Prévert were simply carrying on the tradition of his legend. It lingered after the film’s release, too, since Prévert made a stage scenario for a ballet-pantomime based on the film’s mime sequences, using music by Kosma drawn from his score for the film. But Deburau’s real tradition persisted side by side with the legend: His son Jean-Charles Deburau founded a school of mime, and his students kept the real tradition alive. The film’s casting contains an ironic homage to this history: The role of Baptiste’s perpetually irate father, Anselme, is played by the great mime Étienne Decroux (1898–1991)—the man who had taught mime to the young Barrault (Antonin Artaud had particularly admired one of his early performances). Decroux, after World War II, restarted his own celebrated Ecole de Mime, which boasted, among its earliest students, the great Marcel Marceau and our own wonderful Alvin Epstein. (Marceau was so closely linked to the Deburau tradition that, when he died, The New York Times erroneously reported in its obit that he had appeared in Children of Paradise.)
This may be the place to say something about Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–1994), whose performance as Baptiste, particularly in his mime sequences, dominates most people’s memories of the movie, even though Arletty dominates the movie itself. Only 35 when Children of Paradise was filmed, Barrault had already been a major figure in French theater and film for a decade. He had married the actress Madeleine Renaud, likewise a film star, in 1940; during most of the war years, he was playing lead roles at the Comédie-Française, including Hamlet. After the war, he and Renaud founded the Théâtre de France, where they played a pioneering repertoire that mingled the French classics with popular items by the likes of Feydeau and Offenbach, and in the 1960s premiered works by new writers such as Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco. The company toured extensively, making many visits to New York, where their dazzling performances under Barrault’s astute direction inspired me, like many others, to think of the theater as a profession.
In his heyday, Frédérick Lemaître (1800–1876) was hardly less famous than Deburau or Barrault. Beginning as a knockabout artist in variety theaters—he did once play a lion in a comedy sketch, though not at the Funambules—he rose to be the actor whom the Romantic poets and novelists considered the summit of the spoken art, as Deburau was of the silent. Lemaitre’s breakthrough came not from his Shakespearean achievements—though he was an acclaimed Othello and Hamlet—but from the immense popularity he won in a tacky melodrama called L’Auberge des Adrets (Brigands’ Inn), usually known in English by the name of its villainous lead role, Robert Macaire. What Children of Paradise shows us of this work is largely accurate. Played seriously on its opening night, it fell flat; Lemaître made it a giant success the next night by half-spoofing it, with ad libs and tricks like disappearing from the scene and turning up to shout his lines from the box seats. Later actors who attempted the work, even the dignified Sir Henry Irving, took their cue from Lemaître, throwing in plenty of slapstick shenanigans. The French original did indeed have three authors, who were as indignant about Lemaître’s foolery as Children of Paradise makes them out to be. They threatened to sue Lemaître and supposedly did challenge him to a duel.
Their outrage didn’t stop Lemaître, who built on the opportunity his enormous success as Robert Macaire had offered him by becoming a premier interpreter of the Romantic era’s best-selling playwright-novelists. He played major roles for Victor Hugo in Ruy Blas and Lucretia Borgia. Lemaitre then created a particular sensation when Alexandre Dumas the elder wrote him a half-tragic melodrama about the recently deceased British actor Edmund Kean. (Jean-Paul Sartre made a modern adaptation of Dumas’ play, which the Wright-Forrest team later turned into a Broadway musical for Alfred Drake.) The role of Lemaître in the film was tailor-made for Brasseur (1905–1972), an actor already celebrated by then for seizing outsize chances, equally at home on stage and on film. His stage roles in later years included Sartre’s revision of Dumas’ Kean and a Paris production of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell.
Under Carné’s guidance, Barrault and Brasseur make Deburau and Lemaître a spectacular study in contrasts, friends (and at times friendly rivals) who exemplify the two basic psychological types found in the acting profession: Barrault the introvert, the essence of emotional containment except when uncontrollable passion drives him to speak, somber even when at his funniest, taking setbacks and triumphs alike with a degree of irony; Brasseur, in contrast, all extroverted effusion, a continuous explosion of gestures and words in every direction and on every occasion. Barrault’s Deburau lets things happen to him (we never see him planning or staging the pantomimes he creates); Brasseur’s Lemaître cavalierly ignores everything that happens if it gets in the way of what he’s doing.
And this carefully balanced opposition is only two sides of a triangle, with Garance at its center, equidistant from all three. The third side is Marcel Herrand’s Lacenaire, the unhinged figure, calculating and self-obsessed, whose life is a genuine act of rebellion against the society for which Deburau and Lemaître supply comic or romantic dreams of rebellion. Pierre-François Lacenaire (1803–1836) does not loom so large in history as the two great artists in whose orbit Prévert and Carné chose to put him, but he was a notable enough figure in his time (a little before the major achievements of Deburau and Lemaître), once again a hero to the Romantic writers. Stendhal and Balzac allude to him; Baudelaire called him a modern prototype. And Dostoyevsky seems to have read through his memoirs very carefully while planning Crime and Punishment.
That Lacenaire’s memoirs were published, widely read, and sold internationally tells you how high he stood in the public eye. Unlike the highwaymen of the 18th century, he was the first of the urban celebrity criminals, the educated bourgeois turned antisocial rebel, thief, and murderer. Despite having grown up in a state of severe alienation from his family, he had done brilliantly at school. In later life he wrote poems and song lyrics, which were published with his memoirs. But his violent rebellious streak always prevailed: Once his formal education had ended, his life became a long series of swindles, thefts, and, when necessary in his view, killings. He deserted from two armies (the Swiss and the French), and made common cause not with the writers who would later admire his boldness, but with the considerably less intelligent ordinary crooks he met during his various prison terms. Far from caring for any Garance, in real life, he was probably homosexual, or at least bisexual. One of his closest partners in crime was indeed, as in the film, a younger man named Avril, who was guillotined along with him at the end. Prévert and Carné don’t exactly underline the relationship—the occupation was no time to be pushing the envelope on either public mores or the Nazi censorship’s rules—but the film’s Avril (Fabien Loris) is both awfully good-looking and awfully devoted to Lacenaire: The helpless look on his face when Lacenaire sends him on his way at the end of their last scene together is one of those extra little treasures in which the film abounds.
The free-minded and self-possessed Garance is someone Lacenaire can’t subjugate, just as Deburau can’t rely on the lifetime of mutual devotion he wants from her, and the insouciant Lemaître can’t have her at his beck and call. The man who comes closest to possessing her, the wealthy aristocrat Count Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou), acquires her, one might say, at a moment when she has no one else to turn to. (The decisive moment is, naturally, the end of the film’s first half.) But he soon finds out that the physical ownership of Garance has no more hold over her than the various kinds of emotional ownership the other three men desire. Garance is a spirit not to be pinned down.
And she too has an opposite number in this wildly profuse and yet geometrically structured film: It’s Nathalie (Maria Casarès) the actress at the Funambules who’s a capable but uninspired performer (she keeps her job because her father runs the joint), who’s helplessly in love with Baptiste and thinks only of devoting her life to him and bearing his children. Offstage, she’s the walking definition of the word wife, only not the wife Baptiste would want.
Beautifully played, the role is itself an irony: The Spanish-born Casarès (1922–1996) was celebrated on the Paris stage for the fury and intensity of her emotions; she was the great Phaedra of her era in Racine’s tragedy; Euripides’ ferocious Hecuba was among her other starring roles. (And movie fans know her chiefly as the commanding figure of Death in Cocteau’s Orpheus.) Casarès had learned French as a girl when her family was forced to escape to Paris at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; her father had been a prime minister under the Republic. It had been a struggle; in her student days she was initially rejected by the Conservatoire because of her accent. And one of her mentors had been—another of the film’s ironies—Marcel Herrand (1897–1953), whose appearance as an elegant villain in Children of Paradise and other films belied his questing mind as a visionary actor and director in the theater: He gave Paris its first view of plays such as Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Valle-Inclán’s Divinas Palabras; the repertoire in which he had directed the young Casarès included Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows, Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and the world premiere of Albert Camus’ first produced play, The Misunderstanding. (She and Camus became lovers; the tormented relationship continued until his death.)
The vast range of theaters on display in Children of Paradise—street entertainment, sideshow, mime, melodrama, tragedy‑gets a double echo from our awareness of the film’s historical characters on the one hand and the theatrical life of the actors who play them on the other. Between the three, there’s virtually no aspect of theater that the film doesn’t touch on. At the same time, it never gets hung up on the idea of theater to the exclusion of all else; theater in this film keeps up a running conversation with life. The discrepancy between appearance and reality, between the manufactured illusion and the grungy truth behind the scenes, affects every person and every place, from the Count in his grand, empty mansion to the hotheaded Italian acrobats who start a brawl in the overcrowded backstage of the Funambules. The film’s emblem, or its quintessence, might be the blind beggar who tells Baptiste, “I adore pantomime.” (And he does, too: We later see him up in “paradise,” shouting, “Bravo, Baptiste!”) That’s the beauty of Children of Paradise: You never know where it might take you next. Everything’s glorious, and yet everything might be a trick, a fake, a counterfeit. Love and wealth—the two major goals of human life—may be the biggest illusions of all. The world’s wonderful because it’s so dangerous, so unpredictable, so false. American students to whom I’ve shown Children of Paradise have sometimes expressed disappointment: After investing so much time in these characters (and putting so much effort into reading the subtitles!), they had expected a more neatly resolved, or perhaps a less unhappy, ending. I try to explain to them that life isn’t like that. You have to take your endings as they turn out; the more important question is how much you’ve enjoyed yourself on the way there.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’
