Cocteau has been an innovator, a fashionable one, whose artificialities have always made him open to ridicule; and now that he's getting on, abuse yaps at his heels. But that's not to say that he has not been truly a poet and also that less definable thing a fascinator. His understanding of poetry has always had more than a touch of Chan Canasta. He dazzles with a few absurd props; he brings it off; how does he do it? We have been lured as by some perfect sleight of hand or feat on the high wire. An impossible lightness, a transparent charm, together with the situation to curdle one's blood, have set him apart from contemporaries: and so far as publicity goes, he has no more dined off it than Epstein. His last film, then, should ideally have completed the flourish from Sang d'un Poète to the present; and that includes at least two masterpieces, Les Parents Terribles and Orphée. The fact that it does not, that it's rather a postscript, an entertainment of galvanic old age, is the more pity. Peter Pan's black-sheep brother must spin odd fantasies about death and immortality.

There are in Le Testament d'Orphée … some inspired moments and for the first time, thinking no doubt of posterity and of Picasso's personal appearances, the Master himself plays the leading role of the Poet. He is out of time, appears, disappears, gets killed more than once, and lopes away on his young-old shanks to another day. Distinguished figure, but little more. Is he arraigned before Minerva and another, condemned of innocence and of battering his head against the world's walls? Does an adopted son lure him among gipsies? Does he stalk about quays and the crypts of Les Baux, where black horseheaded guards await him? The twists and turns, under the shadowing of death, are ingenious, disturbing. A torn-up flower is brought back to wholeness; but too many such reversal tricks have made us languid. In a notable scene the spear pierces him through: we know, only too well, he will prance again. It is Cocteau doing his act, even if it is his last act.