Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Cocteau, Jean (Vol. 16) - C. A. Lejeune

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C. A. LEJEUNE

I cannot pretend to know what [Orpheus] all means, and I have a lurking suspicion that Cocteau doesn't know either, but I do know that it sent me out of the theatre quivering with excitement, and more provocatively engaged than I have been by any film for seasons. Cocteau, of course, has two prevailing ideas, that run like coloured thread through all his work: the idea of a poet as an extra-sensory medium, and the idea of a hungry marriage between life and death. He twists these two ideas together in Orpheus, as he did in a tentative way in L'Aigle a Deux Têtes, and has produced a picture that is bewildering, stimulating, sometimes touching and sometimes quite hateful, but always a provocation to the mind and eye. (pp. 185-86)

Since the author believes that all flights of high fantasy must be touched off from a firm earthhold, his film, astonishing in its camera tricks and devices of pure cinema magic, is grounded here and...

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1. Introduction
2. C. G. Wallis
3. Bosley Crowther
4. Bosley Crowther
5. A. H. Weiler
6. Bosley Crowther
7. Jean R. Debrix
8. C. A. Lejeune
9. Neal Oxenhandler
10. William Whitebait
11. Peter John Dyer
12. Roger Manvell
13. Bosley Crowther
14. Roy Armes
15. George Amberg
16. Copyright