Children of Paradise
Directed by	Marcel Carné
Produced by	Raymond Borderie Fred Orain
Written by	Jacques Prévert
Starring	Arletty Jean-Louis Barrault Pierre Brasseur Pierre Renoir
Music by	Maurice Thiriet
Cinematography	Marc Fossard Roger Hubert
Editing by	Henri Rust Madeleine Bonin
Release date(s)	March 9, 1945 November 15, 1946
Running time	190 min (uncut version on DVDs)
Country	France
Language	French
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Les Enfants du Paradis (released as Children of Paradise in North America) is a 1945 film by French director Marcel Carné, made during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is set around the Parisian theatre in 1828 and tells story of a beautiful courtesan, Garance, and the four men who love her in their own ways: a mime, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat. It is an epic, 3 hour film, described in the original trailer as the French answer to Gone with the Wind.^[1] The film was voted "Best French Film of the Century" in a poll of 600 French critics and professionals in 1995. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 450 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (456 × 608 pixel, file size: 533 KB, MIME type: image/png) Film poster for Children of Paradise This image is of a poster, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher or... Marcel Carné (August 18, 1906 - October 31, 1996) was an important French film director. ... Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter who was born on February 4, 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and died on April 11, 1977 in Omonville-la-Petite. ... Arletty (born Léonie Bathiat) (15 May 1898 _ 24 July 1992) was a French model, singer, and actress. ... Jean-Louis Barrault (September 9, 1910 - January 22, 1994) was a French actor, director and mime artist. ... Pierre Brasseur, really Pierre-Albert Espinasse (born December 22, 1905 in Paris; died August 14, 1972 in Brunico, Italy) was a French actor. ... Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841 - December 3, 1919) was a preeminent French painter. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... March 9 is the 68th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (69th in leap years). ... Year 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar). ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... is the 319th day of the year (320th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full 1946 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Children of Paradise is a side-project of the famous German psychedelic trance pioneers X-Dream. ... North America North America is a continent [1] in the Earths northern hemisphere and (chiefly) western hemisphere. ... Marcel Carné (August 18, 1906 - October 31, 1996) was an important French film director. ... Location of Vichy France (green). ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) The Eiffel Tower in Paris, as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... Serge Sudeikins poster for the Bat Theatre (1922). ... A Mime artist on the Ponte SantAngelo A mime artist is someone who uses mime as a theatrical medium or as a performance art. ... Actors in period costume sharing a joke whilst waiting between takes during location filming. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Aristocracy is a form of government in which rulership is in the hands of an upper class known as aristocrats. ... Gone with the Wind is a 1939 film adapted from Margaret Mitchells 1936 novel of the same name. ... The art of motion-picture making within the nation of France or by French filmmakers abroad is collectively known as French cinema. ...

Title

The title refers in part to the members of the theatre audience who inhabit the highest areas and cheapest seats of the theatre such as the upper balconies, which are called the paradis in French theatre (in the British theatre especially, they are similarly known as "the gods"). The film contains many shots of the audience hanging over the edge of these balconies, and screenwriter Jacques Prévert has stated that the title "refers to the actors [...] and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience."[1] The gods is a theatrical term, common in Britain especially, referring to the highest areas of a theatre such as the balconies. ... Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter who was born on February 4, 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and died on April 11, 1977 in Omonville-la-Petite. ...

Story

Baptiste the mime and Garance.

Children of Paradise is set in the theatrical world of Paris in 1828, centred on the area around the Funambules theatre, also known as the 'Boulevard du Crime'. The film revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance (famously played by Arletty). Four men, the mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the thief Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story. Garance is briefly enchanted by them all, but leaves them when they attempt to restrain her freedom. However, the only one whose love is pure, the mime Baptiste is the one who suffers the most in pursuit of the unattainable Garance. Image File history File links Garance. ... Image File history File links Garance. ... Arletty (born Léonie Bathiat) (15 May 1898 _ 24 July 1992) was a French model, singer, and actress. ... Jean-Gaspard Deburau (born Jan KaÅ¡par Dvořák on July 31, 1796 - June 17, 1846) was a Bohemian-French actor and mime. ... Jean-Louis Barrault (September 9, 1910 - January 22, 1994) was a French actor, director and mime artist. ... Frédérick Lemaitre, (July 28, 1800 - January 26, 1876) was a French actor and playwright. ... Pierre Brasseur, really Pierre-Albert Espinasse (born December 22, 1905 in Paris; died August 14, 1972 in Brunico, Italy) was a French actor. ... Pierre François Lacenaire (born 1800 in Lyon; died 1836) was a famous French poet and murderer. ...

Sources

The four men courting Garance are all based on real French personalities of the 1800s. Baptiste Debureau was a famous mime and Frédérick Lemaître was an acclaimed actor on the 'Boulevard of Crime' depicted in the film. Pierre Lacenaire was an infamous French criminal, and the character of the comte Édouard de Montray was inspired by the Duc de Morny. Jean-Gaspard Deburau, born as Jan Kaspar Dvorak 31 July 1796, in Kolín, Bohemia (Czech Republic now), died 17 June 1846, Paris, France, was the French actor and mime who adapted the conventions of Italian commedia dellarte to Parisian tastes. ... Frédérick Lemaitre, (July 28, 1800 - January 26, 1876) was a French actor and playwright. ... Pierre François Lacenaire (born 1800 in Lyon; died 1836) was a famous French poet and murderer. ... Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny ( October 21, 1811 - March 10, 1865), French statesman, was the natural son of Hortense de Beauharnais (wife of Louis Bonaparte, and queen of Holland) and Charles Joseph, comte de Flahaut, and therefore halfbrother of Napoleon III. He was born in Paris, and his...

The idea for making a movie based on these characters came from a chance meeting between Carné and Jean-Louis Barrault, in Nice, during which Barrault pitched the idea of making a movie based on Debureau and Lemaître. Carné, who at the time was hesitant about which movie to direct next, proposed this idea to his friend Jacques Prévert. Prévert was initially reticent at the idea of writing a movie about a pantomine, which of course would not well convey his strenght in dialogues, but then he saw the opportunity to include the character of Lacenaire, the "Dandy of crime", who fascinated him. The Germans were then occupying the whole of France, and Prévert is rumoured to have said "They will not let me do a movie about Lacenaire, but I can put Lacenaire in a film about Debureau".^[2] This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Production

The film was extremely difficult to make, in small part due to Acts of God not uncommon in film production, but mainly as these were exacerbated and compounded by the theatrical constraints during the French occupation. In fact, the production of Children of Paradise, which took place between 1943 and 1944, was a veritable tour de force of French spirit overcoming adversities in the wake of their military defeat. The passion dedication of the team surrounding Carné for this film, who showed remarkable resilience in the face of potentially deadly adversity, and the undertone of defiance of the screenplay in the context of Nazi occupation, may explain, in part, why it became and remains the greatest French film of all times. Theatrical constraints are various rules, either of taste or of law, that govern the production, staging, and content of stage plays in the theater. ... Year 1943 (MCMXLIII) was a common year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1943 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ...

The Vichy administration imposed a maximum time limit of 90 minutes for feature films. As a result of this, the film was split into its two parts - Le Boulevard du crime ("The Boulevard of Crime") and L'Homme blanc ("The White Man").

Noted critic Pauline Kael allegedly wrote "that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed".^[3] Many of those 1,800 extras were Resistance agents using the film as daytime cover, who, until the Liberation, had to mingle with some collaborators or Vichy sympathisers who were imposed on the production by the authorities. ^[4] Alexandre Trauner, who designed the sets, and Joseph Kosma, who composed the music, were both Jewish, thus they had to work in complete secrecy throughout the production and their work was attributed to others in the credits. Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine. ...

The production was short of set building supplies and suffered rationed film stock. The financing, originally a French-Italian production, fell apart a few weeks after production began In Nice, due to the Allied conquest of Sicily in August 1943. Around that time, the Nazis forbade the producer, André Paulvé, to continue working on the film because of remote Jewish ancestry and the production had to be interrupted for three months. Pathé Cinéma took over production, whose cost was escalating 'à la DeMille'. The fact that the quarter-mile long main set, the "Boulevard du Temple", was severely damaged by a storm and had to be rebuilt did not help. By the time shooting resumed in Paris in early spring of 1944, the Director of Photography, Roger Hubert, had been assigned to another production and Philippe Agostini, who replaced him, had to analyze all the reels in order to match the lighting of the non-sequential shot list, all the while electricity in the Paris Studios was intermittent.

Production was further delayed after the allies disembarked in Normandy, perhaps intentionaly stalled so that it would only be completed after the French Liberation. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, the actor Robert le Vigan, who was, ironically, cast in the role of informer-thief Jericho, was sentenced to death by the Resistance for collaborating with the Nazis, and had to flee, along with the author Céline, to Sigmaringen. He was replaced at a moment’s notice by Pierre Renoir, older brother of French filmmaker Jean Renoir and son of the famous Painter, and most of the scenes had to be redone.^[5] Vigan was tried and convicted as a Nazi collaborator in 1946. One scene featuring Vigan survives in the middle of the second part, when Jericho snitches to Nathalie.^[6] Céline Céline redirects here. ... Sigmaringen is a city in southern Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, formerly Hohenzollern, capital of the Sigmaringen district. ... Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841 - December 3, 1919) was a preeminent French painter. ... Jean Renoir Jean Renoir (September 15, 1894 – February 12, 1979), born in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris, France was a film director. ... National Socialism redirects here. ... Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge[1] and mutual learning between two or more people working together[2] toward a common goal typically creative in nature. ...

Baptiste's father is played by mime and mime theorist Etienne Decroux, who was Jean-Louis Barrault's teacher. Many of his character's lines about theatre can be interpreted as ironic statements on his own work in corporeal mime.^{[citation needed]} Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet Standard that extends the format of e-mail to support: text in character sets other than US-ASCII; non-text attachments; multi-part message bodies; and header information in non-ASCII character sets. ... Étienne Decroux (July 19, 1898 in Paris, France - March 12, 1991 in Billancourt, Somme, Picardie) was a French actor noted for his pantomime. ... Jean-Louis Barrault (September 9, 1910 - January 22, 1994) was a French actor, director and mime artist. ... One subgroup of physical theater is corporeal mime. ...

Carné and Prévert hid some of the key reels of film from the occupying forces, hoping that Paris would be liberated by the time the film was completed.^{[citation needed]}

Release versions

Criterion Collection DVD cover

The Premiere of the film was shown in Paris, at the Chaillot Palace on March 9, 1945 in its entirety. Carné then had to fight with the producers to have the movie shown in exclusivity in two theatres (Madeleine and Colisée) instead of one, in its entirety, without intermission despite its lenght. He also pioneered the idea that the public could reserve their seats in advance. They accepted on the condition that they charged double the price of admitance. Children of Paradise became an instant and monumental success, remaining on the screen of the Madeleine Theater for 54 weeks. Image File history File links Childrenofparadise. ... Image File history File links Childrenofparadise. ... March 9 is the 68th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (69th in leap years). ... Year 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar). ...

There are various alternate cuts of this film; the complete version, which is available on DVD, is variously described as 190 minutes (Second Sight Films, 1991) and 195 minutes (Criterion Collection, 2002); the difference is likely due to the speed differences between NTSC and PAL video formats.^[7] The Criterion version has since been re-released by Pathé Classique with a remastered Dolby 5.1 soundtrack, unfortunately only available in Zone 2. The references in this article would be clearer with a different and/or consistent style of citation, footnoting or external linking. ... Television encoding systems by nation. ...

Influence

• In the Centre Pompidou in Paris, there is a theater named after Arletty's character, the Salle Garance (Garance's Room).
• A copy of the film plays a significant part in the plot of Flicker, a cult novel by Theodore Roszak.
• In the Tom Robbins novel Still Life with Woodpecker, the protagonist, an outlaw bomber nicknamed "The Woodpecker" (hence the title), cites the film - and its successful underground production in Nazi-occupied France - as a justification of his claim that even in the event of a global catastrophe, people will always have freedom and enjoyment.
• British musician Marianne Faithfull has written lyrics based on the story.
• Singer Bob Dylan has stated that this film was a large influence on his 1975 surreal film Renaldo and Clara.^{[citation needed]}
• In the James A. Michener novel The Drifters, the narrator digresses that he learns foreign languages by listening to lectures by tutors. The "aha" moment for French was when the tutor, lecturing on French actresses, mentions Arletty. This starts another digression, that the narrator knew a psychiatrist who made every new patient go see "Children of Paradise," and would then quiz the patient about with which character they identify.
• British filmmaker Terry Gilliam did a five minute video presentation for the Criterion release, in which he saluted Children of Paradise as one of his favorites and a source of inspiration, because of its dreamlike quality.

The Pompidou Centres famous external skeleton of service pipes. ... Flicker is a novel by Theodore Roszak and published in 1991. ... Theodore Roszak is an American professor, social thinker, writer, and critic. ... Tom Robbins at a reading of Wild Ducks Flying Backward in San Francisco on September 24, 2005 Thomas Eugene Robbins (born July 22, 1936 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina) is an American author. ... Cover of Still Life With Woodpecker, echoing the design of the Camel cigarette packet Still Life With Woodpecker is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. ... Marianne Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer and actress whose career spans over four decades. ... Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, and poet who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. ... Renaldo and Clara is a surrealist movie, by and starring Bob Dylan. ... James Albert Michener (February 3, 1907? - October 16, 1997) was the American author of such books as Tales of the South Pacific (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948), Hawaii, The Drifters, Centennial, The Source, The Fires of Spring, Chesapeake, Caribbean, Caravans, Alaska, Texas, and Poland. ... The Drifters are a long-lived American doo wop/R&B band, originally formed by Clyde McPhatter (of Billy Ward & the Dominoes) in 1953. ... Terrence Vance Gilliam (born November 22, 1940) is an American-born British filmmaker, animator, and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. ...

Notes

1. ^ Original trailer, available on the Criterion Collection DVD edition.
2. ^ Philippe Morisson, http://www.dvdclassik.com/Critiques/enfants-du-paradis-dvd.htm
3. ^ Roger Ebert, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020106/REVIEWS08/201060301/1023
4. ^ http://www.eufs.org.uk/films/les_enfants_du_paradis.html
5. ^ Philippe Morisson, http://www.dvdclassik.com/Critiques/enfants-du-paradis-dvd.htm
6. ^ http://www.digitallyobsessed.com/showreview.php3?ID=2960
7. ^ DVD Comparison, Marcel Carnés Children of Paradise, Dvdbeaver.com.

The Criterion Collection is a joint venture between Janus Films and The Voyager Company that was begun in the mid 1980s for the purpose of releasing authoritative consumer versions of classic and important contemporary films on the laserdisc and DVD formats. ...

See also

• Cinema of France
• List of French language films

The art of motion-picture making within the nation of France or by French filmmakers abroad is collectively known as French cinema. ... There are two lists of French language films: Organized alphabetically by French title Organized alphabetically by title of English release // 2 ou 3 choses que je sais delle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) 5x2 Ah! Si jétais riche (If I Were a Rich Man) Les...

External links

• Enfants du paradis, Les at the Internet Movie Database
• Les Enfants du Paradis at SensesOfCinema.com
• Children of Paradise review by Roger Ebert
• Criterion Collection essay by Peter Cowie
• Criterion Collection Marcel Carné Interview by Brian Stonehill
• Review by Debi Lee Mandel
• Review by Gio MacDonald
• Review By Christopher Null
• Essay By Stuart Fernie
• Essay by Philippe Morisson, In French