L’Aigle à deux têtes [The Eagle with Two Heads] **** (1948, Edwige Feuillère, Jean Marais, Silvia Monfort) – Classic Movie Review 5832

Writer-director Jean Cocteau’s sumptuous, exquisitely acted 1948 French film stars Jean Marais as suicidal anarchist poet on the run Stanislas, who sneaks in to the royal bedroom of a remote castle to kill the Queen, Natasha (Edwige Feuillère), and then kill himself.

Stanislas resembles the Queen’s late husband, who was assassinated on their wedding day ten years earlier, and she says she will kill Stanislas if he does not kill her.

[Spoiler alert] However, Stanislas and the Queen find themselves falling in love, partly because he resembles the king, and there is hope, yet eventually still with doomed results.

Feuillère and Marais are highly impressive in this intriguing, intelligent and wonderfully romantic Cocteau movie, based on his own 1946 stage play, which originally starred the film’s two leads in Paris.

Cocteau follows the three-act structure of the play but he opens out some of the scenes into a wider variety of locations. It was shot in October 1947 at the Château de Vizille and later at the Studio d’Épinay on the outskirts of Paris. Georges Auric’s score is an expanded version of the music he written for the stage production.

Also in the cast are Silvia Monfort, Edouard Dermithe (uncredited), Jean Debucourt, Jacques Varennes, Ahmed Abdallah, Gilles Quénant, Maurice Nasil, Edward Stirling, Yvonne de Bray, and Capucine.

It is distributed by Les Films Ariane, shot in black and white by Christian Matras, produced by Georges Dancigers and Alexandre Mnouchkine, and designed by Christian Bérard and Georges Wakhévitch.

Feuillère gives a record-breaking 20-minute speech as Natasha.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5832

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