La Belle et la Bête ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1946)
Writer/Director Jean Cocteau’s magnificent & visually surreal odyssey, thanks in part to the stunning cinematography by Henri Alekan.
It stars Jean Marais as the enigmatic Beast who falls in love with the beautiful Belle (Josette Day), who has come to his hidden castle in order to take her father’s place as his prisoner. The Beast is enraptured by Belle and wishes to marry her. At first, horrified by the presence of this mysterious creature, she grows to care deeply for him. This film presents some of the most intoxicating imagery you’ll ever see. And like Belle… I found the Beast far more attractive than the Prince (also portrayed by Marais!)
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête: Beauty and the Beast (1946) is renowned for its stunning design elements, which blend surrealism, gothic romance, and poetic imagery to create a magical, dreamlike landscape. The film’s visual style is a testament to Cocteau’s artistic sensibilities and his collaboration with key talents like cinematographer Henri Alekan and set designer Christian Bérard.
Henri Alekan’s black-and-white cinematography transforms everyday objects into elements of fantasy. Smoke, fog, and shimmering light create an ethereal quality that blurs the line between reality and imagination, and Cocteau’s use of mirrors as portals to other worlds reflects his fascination with transformation and duality, a recurring theme in his work.
The Beast’s castle is a hauntingly beautiful space inspired by Gustave Doré’s engravings. It features long shadowy hallways, billowing white curtains, and disembodied arms holding candelabras—an iconic touch that evokes both wonder and unease.
Belle’s family home contrasts sharply with the castle, drawing inspiration from Jan Vermeer’s paintings. The farmhouse scenes are grounded in realism, emphasizing Belle’s humble life before entering the fantastical world of the Beast.
The elaborate costumes by Christian Bérard and Marcel Escoffier enhance the fairytale aesthetic. Belle’s flowing gowns contrast with the Beast’s intricate lion-like makeup, which took hours to apply.
René Clément worked as a technical advisor, and Hagop Arakelian was responsible for designing the regal Beast make-up. The Beast’s design is both majestic and, while presented as a visage that is supposed to be grotesque, embodying his internal struggle between humanity and monstrosity. I find him most regal and beautiful in his sympathetic vulnerability. As a cat worshipper, I could never find a feline visage grotesque, even when they throw up in my shoes!
La Belle et la Bête incorporates symbolic objects like the rose, mirror, key, horse, and glove, each tied to the narrative’s themes of love, transformation, and power. The Gothic elements of the castle—such as living statues with moving eyes—heighten the sense of enchantment while maintaining a gorgeous yet eerie undertone.
The film masterfully juxtaposes Belle’s mundane world with the Gothic opulence of the Beast’s realm, emphasizing duality, metamorphosis, and redemption. This symmetry reflects Belle’s journey from innocence to self-awareness as she navigates between two contrasting worlds. Cocteau’s film is more than a fairy tale; it is visual poetry brought to life and, well… a thing of beauty!
The Queen of Spades 1949
Ink, Shadows, and the Turn of the Third Card: Destiny, Dealt in the Dark
Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades (1949) creeps in as one of those whispered rumors or hushed tales, a slightly mysterious great-grandmother (I had one of those) from the old country spins by lamplight on a cold winter night, a ghost story her grandchildren will carry with them and never quite shake.
It’s a British Gothic/psychological chiller drawn from Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 novella, a tale of cursed cards, desperate men, and the price you pay when you bargain with the dark forces that exist around us. We’re in 19th-century St. Petersburg, where chandeliers glitter, snow glows outside the windows, and everyone seems to be gambling with something: romance, money, reputation, and even their very souls.
The film stars Anton Walbrook as Captain Herman Suvorin, with Dame Edith Evans as Countess Ranevskaya and Yvonne Mitchell as Lizaveta Ivanova, who becomes one of her servants.
You might know Edith Evans as a towering stage legend, but on film, she really lives in just a few key roles: as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest 1952, Tom Jones 1963, The Nun’s Story 1959, The Chalk Garden 1964, and The Whisperers 1967. On screen, she peaks in The Whisperers, which follows an elderly woman, alone in a shabby ground-floor flat, haunted by half?imagined voices and slowly worn down by poverty, neglect, and the petty, everyday cruelties of the welfare state.
which brought her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, a fistful of critics’ prizes, and an Oscar nomination, and quietly reintroduced her to the world—not just as a grand dame of the theatre, but as a late-career character actress with real weight and vulnerability
At the center of it all is Suvorin, a man so consumed by the idea of winning that you can almost see the hunger humming under his skin. Walbrook is masterful at showing this merely with the hard, glittering focus of his eyes.
Suvorin is an obsessive gambler who becomes fixated on learning a secret three-card trick from an ancient Countess, whom it is whispered made a deal with the devil himself, the lord of loaded dice, his sulfurous majesty. And she actually walked away with the secret of a three-card sequence that can’t lose. From that moment on, Suvorin was done for. The Countess is played by Evans with the chill of a mausoleum and the hauteur of a woman who has outlived everyone and everything that mattered.
The cards are not just a clever trick; they are his private escape from the humiliations of chance. From that moment, the film quietly shifts his obsession away from money toward something even more corrosive: the dream of escaping risk altogether.
Suvorin is an outsider among his fellow officers, standing at the edge of the gambling table, his eyes fixed not on the glitter of coins but on the calm assurance of men who’ve learned to live with risk. He’s a man who hoards his money and his emotions, an observer who insists on control, and it is precisely this hunger for certainty that makes the legend he hears one night feel less like gossip and more like fate clearing its throat
Walbrook is enigmatic, oozing a mania of greed and obsession, under the influence of the supernatural as Suvorin manipulates the Countess’s young ward, Lizaveta, to gain access to the old Countess. He never enters the stubborn old aristocrat, this fiercely preserved old relic’s world, outright; he edges into it by seducing Lizaveta.
Walbrook’s performance is quite a different animal when seen against his earlier turns in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 1945 and The Red Shoes 1948; it becomes quite a pivot: another portrait of a driven, haunted man, but here shaded with greed, desperation, paranoia, self-loathing, and a kind of spiritual homelessness.
Yvonne Mitchell’s Lizaveta, the Countess’s young companion, is lonely enough to mistake his attention for affection. He uses her, quite ruthlessly, as a key, slipping into the old woman’s domain of shadows and secrets. What starts as a scheme to crack this gambling code quickly turns into something darker, as if the air itself thickens around the Countess and the man who dares to trespass.
The young companion trapped in the suffocating orbit of that ancient, embittered grande dame. Lisaveta’s life is a routine of small humiliations: she’s scolded, surveilled, and treated more like a nuisance and an accessory than a person, which makes her both vulnerable and dangerous to Suvorin. He courts her at first with a sort of fevered sincerity that looks like romance from a distance but, under the light, reveals itself as pure calculation.
The dark-eyed, regal Yvonne Mitchell, even in her first screen role, brings a quiet gravity and self-possession as the naive, romantic Lizaveta, hinting at a sharper, stronger woman than a standard ingénue waiting just beyond the Countess’s suffocating rooms. You see not just a naïve companion ripe for exploitation, but someone whose intelligence and emotional life have been cramped by circumstance rather than erased by it, though she falls under the spell of the wicked Suvorin.
In a way, Lizaveta becomes dangerous to him in a very specific, almost ironic way: she’s the one person who can expose how calculated his “love” really is.
Mitchell’s work is especially noted for The Divided Heart (1954), where she won a British Film Award, and Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), which brought her a Silver Bear at Berlin. She turns up in key 1950s British dramas and thrillers such as Turn the Key Softly (1953), Sapphire (1959), Tiger Bay (1959), Conspiracy of Hearts (1960), and The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), in which she plays Constance Wilde. Later, she appeared in titles such as Genghis Khan (1965), Crucible of Horror (also known as The Corpse, 1971), Demons of the Mind (1972), The Great Waltz (1972), and The Incredible Sarah (1976).
Suvorin targets Lizaveta because she’s vulnerable and isolated. Through stolen glances, letters slipped into her path, and clandestine meetings, he constructs the illusion of a love story, but every gesture is angled toward the same goal: gaining access to the Countess’s rooms.
He sends her plagiarized love letters, banking on the fact that she’s never read the novel he’s stealing from, and counts on her desperation to escape the Countess’s household. That makes her an ideal mark, but it also makes her the witness who can later see him clearly: she later realizes that his entry into the house wasn’t fate or romance, it was strategy. Once she understands that, this is where Lizaveta becomes dangerous to him. He likes to tell himself a grand story about what he’s doing, that it’s destiny, that he’s driven by some larger force, that he has no real choice. Lizaveta is living proof that this isn’t true. She reveals the cold, premeditated steps he took to get to the Countess. The innocent girl he treats as a tool is also the one who holds the evidence that his supposed grand design is, in fact, a cold-blooded seduction and just a cruel con.
The turning point, for me, is the night he finally crosses the threshold. She signals him by leaving a candle in her window and has given away the location of the Countess’s room.
Lisaveta, persuaded and betrayed in the same breath, arranges for the door to be left open, and he slips into the Countess’s bedroom like a shadow that’s decided to finally act alone.
The old woman is somewhere between relic and revenant, somewhat of a living corpse in her elaborate dress and old-world habits, shrouded in fabrics and gestures from another century, attended to like a living museum piece.
He hides and waits for her return from the ball, the camera tightening as the rhythms of nighttime settle over the house: servants dismissed, candles dimmed, the last small sounds of an enormous estate going to sleep.
Walbrook circles the old lioness of the court with a mix of calculation and awe. When she is alone, he steps from the dark, an extortionist trying to strong-arm fate. He demands the secret of the three cards, speaking in a tone that starts as pleading and quickly darkens into a threat.
The scene plays like an argument with history itself, this fragile ancient figure clinging to what’s left of her past, desperate, he demands the formula that should not have existed in the first place.
Terrified, the Countess refuses to speak, her body seizing from the shock of his intrusion. When she refuses, he ends up threatening her with a pistol; she dies from fright without revealing the secret and giving him what he wants. It’s one of those sickening beats where everything he thinks he’s in control of slips through his fingers. He has violated a sanctuary, frightened an old woman to death, and still ends up empty-handed. The secret only comes later via the ghostly visitation.
Suvorin doesn’t really escape the Countess when she dies; she just follows him on a different plane. At the funeral, he glares at her coffin with this uneasy mix of anger and fear, as if she’s still managing to cheat him. The church, candles, chanting, dark cloth, feels less like a place of mourning than a stage for his nerves to fray. Back in his room, when her ghost appears, the story finally steps fully into the uncanny. She gives him the three winning cards and attaches a moral footnote, a condition: marry Lisaveta.
That sounds suspiciously like the universe trying to force a bit of conscience on him. He takes the numbers and ignores the rest. When he walks into the gambling hall, he acts like the night already belongs to him, and he’s a man who’s finally going to collect what the universe owes him.
The first card wins, the second card wins, and you can feel the room’s fascination as the onlookers lean in: smoke hanging in the air, low voices, everyone wondering if he really has found a way to beat the odds.
Suvorin believes it completely; in his head, he’s slipped free of chance. Then the last hand comes, he pushes everything forward, turns his card, and gets the Queen of Spades! wearing her face, in his mind, turning into the Countess’s. In a heartbeat, the money is gone, the room’s awe turns icy, and something in him gives way, and Suvorin finally goes mad. He has not beaten fate; he’s been feeding his own delusion.
By the end, there’s no resolution or comfort, even for Lisaveta, who is left with the knowledge that love can be used as a weapon. Suvorin is a hollowed-out cautionary tale, a reminder of what happens when you try to bully fate into behaving.
The legend keeps its power, and in the film’s imagination, you’re left with the sense that the Queen of Spades is still somewhere in the deck, waiting for the next person who thinks they’ve found a way around luck.
Walbrook plays Suvorin like a man forever teetering between reason and delirium. One moment he’s the cool rationalist, sneering at superstition; the next, his eyes catch the light in a way that makes you wonder what, exactly, he’s seeing in the shadows. If the film didn’t point to Suvorin’s entanglement with fear, superstition, and a tremendous ego, you might believe you see a flicker of him haunted by guilt, or has he really opened a door that should have stayed bolted? Is he being hunted by the Devil, or simply losing himself to madness?
The film never quite lets you off the hook; every logical explanation seems to leave just enough room for something uncanny to slip through, and that’s what makes The Queen of Spades so visually intoxicating.
The narrative delves into the destructive nature of avarice, with Suvorin’s relentless pursuit of wealth and control leading to tragic consequences and his maniacal undoing. The film also examines the tension between rationality and superstition as Suvorin grapples with seemingly supernatural events.
Dickinson films all of this with a rich, brooding flair. The interiors feel like gilded mausoleums: heavy drapes, ornate mirrors, and those deep pools of black shadow that look ready to swallow the characters whole. Light and darkness battle it out in every frame, faces half-carved by candlelight, staircases that vanish into ink, cards gleaming like tiny white tombstones on the imagined color of green felt wool. There are close-ups of Walbrook’s gaze so intense they almost feel like a challenge to us: are you really sure this is all in HIS head?
The world around Suvorin is just as expressive. Cinematographer Otto Heller’s work is explicitly visual and metaphorical, turning rooms into traps of light and shadow. with his use of towering shadows, inky pools of darkness, expressionist angles, creating St. Petersburg as a maze of obsidian and candleflame, faces carved out of shadow like reliefs, the gambling den as a kind of infernal chapel where light and smoke conspire to turn men into specters.
Thorold Dickinson leans hard into a brooding, Gothic mood. He floods those St. Petersburg interiors with chiaroscuro light, letting faces and corridors emerge from the dark as if the shadows are thinking for themselves. The camera keeps circling back to Walbrook’s eyes in unnervingly tight close-ups, so that a single glance can feel like a threat or a crack in his sanity.
Georges Auric’s score seems to breathe down the back of your neck, nudging every scene a shade closer to nightmare. Auric’s music threads through it all like a nervous pulse, amplifying the sense that fate is already written, and every choice these characters make is just another step toward it.
And the way Oliver Messel’s (and William Kellner’s (the film’s art director) sets and costume design, along with Heller’s lens, make the Welwyn stages feel like a haunted city rather than a modest British studio. The gothic textures, the baroque interiors, the way mirrors and high angles warp scale and sanity, all circle back to the film’s preoccupation with fate and damnation.
The rooms are crowded with heavy fabrics, ornate furniture, and elaborate uniforms and gowns, in particular Countess Ranevskaya’s costumes, that don’t just signal 19th-century Russian aristocracy, they make the whole society feel overdecorated and airless, as if the characters are being slowly smothered by their own luxury.
What I love is how the film stands at a crossroads: you can feel the influence of German Expressionism in those tilted shadows and uncanny compositions, but there’s also the fatalism and moral rot of film noir seeping through the cracks. It’s Gothic horror dressed in cards and uniforms, already nudging its way toward the more modern obsessions of psychological thrillers, what happens inside a mind when greed, fear, obsession, and desire all start playing their own rigged game.
By the time the final card is turned, The Queen of Spades isn’t just a story about a man who wants to win at the gambling table. It’s about the cost of wanting too much, the ghosts we create for ourselves, and the way a single obsession can redraw the entire deck of a life. It’s the kind of film that makes you feel, just for a moment, that if you glanced over your shoulder, you might see an old woman watching you from the dark, smirking as if she knows exactly how your luck will run.
When people talk about the great, half-forgotten corners of British cinema, The Queen of Spades is one of the films I always want to press into their hands, saying here watch this. It’s a small masterpiece of mood: the way it folds psychological horror into a story that never quite decides whether we’re seeing ghosts or a mind cracking under pressure feels startlingly modern, and you can feel its fingerprints on the more sophisticated supernatural films that came after it.
11 down, only 139 to go!-Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl
