Beauty and the Beast (1978) A Grim Fairytale (Review)

The film opens in a mist-shrouded, decaying forest. A band of grimy-looking travellers on horseback, pulling covered wagons are traversing this ominous terrain, accompanied only by the forbidding sounds of the wild. One in their number, a female, anxiously announces that danger will befall them if they continue – but she is silenced, her pleas curtly ignored in a manner which the audience realises they will regret, should they have the luxury of living available to them. The next scene takes place in a market and, though may initially appear more civilised, we are soon privy to the perfunctory slaughter of animals; chickens are beheaded, whilst innards spill forth from pale pig carcasses. A river of blood is poured into a bowl of oatmeal, as preparation for black pudding. Climbing up a ladder, a man hurriedly follows a maiden into the hay for the proverbial roll, to the amusement of onlookers. Life and death teems in the opening moments of Juraj Herz’s Beauty and the Beast, released to Blu-ray on the Second Run label this week. There isn’t a singing candle in sight.

The fact that Herz is best known for his chilling, blackly comic Czech masterpiece The Cremator (1969) ought to tell you that this adaptation is perhaps not for the kiddies. Here, the Czech filmmaker and survivor of the WWII concentration camps taps into the gothic tradition of the fairytale, as evinced by the film’s title; Panna a netvor may go by the name Beauty and the Beast in the West, but it’s literal translation is the more accurate ‘The Virgin and the Monster’. Though Herz went on to make several fairytales in his career, it’s fair to say that he approached this film, his first of the genre, out of sheer necessity. The Cremator just managed to slip out in the aftermath of the Prague Spring of ’68, but the Soviet Union’s restrictive ‘normalisation’ program of recentralisation and filmmaking by approval would soon suppress the Czech arts of its voice. Unwilling to make Soviet propaganda and facing a ban for his non-compliance, Herz let it be known among his peers and contemporaries that he was willing to accept any project that could be considered relatively innocuous, politically neutral and therefore be of little concern to the Communist authorities. Enter Ota Hofman of the children’s film unit and a recognised authority on fairytales. Would Herz like to make a new version of Beauty and the Beast?

Initially, Herz was far from keen. Having seen and admired Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation La Belle at la Bête he felt that there was little point in attempting to tell the story again. Hofman persisted, citing that there was much scope in the material, which was to be based on a stageplay by the renowned Czech poet, František Hrubín. But again, Herz was unconvinced; if it had been done on the stage, it had been done. However, the desire to work, combined with the filmmaker’s natural tendency towards life’s dark tapestry – unsurprising given his childhood experiences at the Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen camps – compelled him to search for something within the project. Approaching Hrubín’s play, he became intrigued by the complexity of the Beast and began to appreciate how much more earthy and realistic the poet’s take on the traditional tale had been in comparison to Cocteau’s dreamy, elegant retelling. Together, Herz and Hofman collaborated on a screenplay that would be faithful to the origins of the fairytale; the disquieting folk tales told across Eastern Europe that focused on morality (or a lack of) and held little sensitivity for the fears of children. This can be seen in the brutal and bloody destruction that befalls the band of travellers first witnessed in the opening scene, which owes more to Hammer Horror than it does Cocteau or Disney. Likewise, the decision to follow their fate being sealed with the ‘civilised’ carnage of the marketplace and its lecherous inhabitants has just as much to say about predatory, unscrupulous behaviour.

Perhaps the biggest and most striking difference in how Herz approaches the classic tale lies in the depiction of the Beast himself. Tradition holds that the creature owes an ancestral debt to a lion, wolf or bear, but here the film boldly breaks with such a tradition to create a unique avian-like beast, with matted feathers, a swivel-eye and tatty cape, unforgettably brought to life by prestigious artist/designer Olga Poláčková-Vyleťalová. To Herz, a bird represents a far more alien form than a mammal; thereby heightening the difference between the eponymous characters, and the seeming void between communication, empathy and connection. Knowing that any actor portraying the Beast would be robbed of their natural inclination to emote through facial expressions, Herz hired ballet’s Vlastimil Harapes for his ability to express the emotions required for the story via his body and how he moved. It would prove to be a move that would later be replicated by director Graeme Harper’s decision to cast ballet dancer and Ken Russell regular Christopher Gable in the role of a masked, facially disfigured sympathetic villain in the final story of the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who, The Caves of Androzani, a story by veteran Who scriptwriter and arch-plagiarist Robert Holmes that owes more than a debt to Beauty and the Beast and similar aesthetically-challenged, doomed romances like The Phantom of the Opera). Herz’s Beast is preoccupied with an internal battle between his human and animal form, doomed to live a life haunted by a sinister internal monologue that swings between the desire to love or murder the beauty that has so enchanted him. Tellingly for someone who had witnessed humanity at its very worst, Herz’s Beast is just as prone to violence in human form as he is as the creature, which is a significant break from tradition.

Taking the role of the ‘Beauty’, named here as Julia, is Slovak actress Zdena Studenková. Julia is depicted as the youngest daughter of a merchant widow (Václav Voska) and the replica of his late second wife, whose portrait he must sell in order to pay for the weddings of his two eldest daughters to far more successful merchants than him. These selfish sisters, portrayed by Jana Brejchová and Zuzana Kocúriková, enjoy a nasty, teasing relationship with their younger half-sister that recalls to mind another set of fairytale characters, Cinderella and the ugly sisters. Their hard-up father enters the woods with his painting and quickly becomes lost, seeking shelter in the Gothic ruin that will prove to be the Beast’s lair. Once again, Herz’s intention to bring the macabrely malevolent to the surface is apparent in the impressive set design of the castle, which is overrun with decaying plants, steaming swamps and sinister unseen forces. What then follows is relatively faithful to the traditions of the fairytale, with Julia pledging to take her father’s place at the castle, thus sacrificing herself. The scenes in which Julia becomes the Beast’s prisoner are a potent visual delight and none more so than her first night there when, laid out on a four poster bed, the columns are revealed to be people who then proceed to lower the uppermost structure of the bed until, like a coffin, it entraps her sleeping form. This in turn leads to her dream sequence, a romantic sequence shot through a golden haze that introduces her to the Beast’s human form. Uniquely, her dreamlike appreciation of her captor continues until the final act – a kind of Stockholm syndrome that repeatedly ignores the hints that exist all around her as to the Beast’s true form. It could therefore be argued that Julia is as much refusing to acknowledge her own inner voice as the Beast attempts with his own.

Ultimately, the film concludes in the traditional manner with Julia acknowledging her love for the Beast, enabling his restoration to his former state. Herz’s decision to end with a sequence that recalled the dreams depicted earlier drew criticism from some quarters, but it’s important to remember that this finale is so close to the dream that it may itself be a dream, as opposed to the sentimental happy ending some scorned. If so, it’s a daring, subtle riposte from Herz whose finished product had already caused consternation among the authorities. On hearing how children were leaving the cinema terrified by what they had witnessed, Barrandov Studios began to reconsider this film they had previously passed for approval. Could they have been tricked by Herz? Was this in fact, a horror film – a genre now banned in Czechoslovakia? Hofman had to defend the film he made with Herz, using every bit of credibility he had as head of children’s film and his experience of adapting fairytales. The film began to receive warnings in the press as not perhaps being ‘fully for children’ but was awarded internationally at several film festivals which perhaps pleased the Soviet authorities, as they believed it would reflect well on the superiority of the Communist East over the Capitalist West.

Released to Second Run, Beauty and the Beast boasts a new HD transfer from the Czech National Film Archive, a newly recorded audio commentary from Mike White, Samm Deighan and Kat Ellinger and a 1964 short film on František Hrubín.

THANKS FOR READING MARK’S REVIEW OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

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