The Children of Paradise

Even in 1945, Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise was regarded as an old-fashioned film. Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1840s, Jacques Prévert's screenplay concerns four men in love with the mysterious Garance (Arletty). Each loves Garance in his own fashion, but only the intentions of ...more

Shooting secretly over a two-year period during the German Occupation of France, director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert produced their grandest masterwork. In the 19th century Paris theater world, life and performance become interchangeable, as the complex romantic entanglements of Arletty's inscrutable Garance with superficial actor Frederick, a wealthy count, and especially Jean-Louis Barrault's sensitive mime Baptiste become fodder for the masses crowding the "Street of Crimes" and ...more