Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné, whose “Paradis” turned to pain, died on October 31st 1996, aged 90

While in his thirties Marcel Carné made “Les Enfants du Paradis”, considered by some critics to be the world’s best film. Although the film was a triumph, it came to be a personal burden. For ever after, at festivals and other gatherings, people would come up to Mr Carné and praise “Paradis”. He would smile courteously and seek to move the conversation to his latest project. But nothing Mr Carné made in the 50 years of his life after “Paradis” was judged to be in the same class.

Critics said he had lost his touch, or belonged to a bygone era, or whatever. Orson Welles (1915–85) suffered similarly. Anything he did was liable to be measured, adversely, against “Citizen Kane”, regarded as his masterpiece, and made when he was 25. Like Orson Welles, Marcel Carné never lost his enthusiasm for film. He turned up at the Cannes film festival as recently as 1992. But, like Welles, he was edged to the periphery of the business, when once he had occupied the centre.

Was “Paradis” the best film ever made? The critics who voted it number one were French. But less nationalistic critics elsewhere have consistently put it in their “ten best” list. The film is shown every Saturday in one Paris cinema, and presumably this will continue for as long as the building stands. (Paris likes this agreeable type of memorial: for the past 40 years the Théâtre de la Huchette has been putting on for six nights a week two plays by Eugène Ionesco.) More generally, the film is revived from time to time, but usually in cinemas known in the trade as “art houses”. Variety, an American showbusiness newspaper, once called the film “beautiful” but, perhaps reflecting a Hollywood view, said it was “downright dull”. There are no car chases, no shoot-outs, no violent language. Take your seat for three hours and a quarter and immerse yourself in improbable love stories set in theatrical Paris of the 19th century.

However it looks now, when “Paradis” was released at the end of the second world war, it came as a total surprise. Mr Carné’s pre-war films had tended to be pessimistic. “Paradis”, made in Paris during the German occupation, was a sumptuous fantasy. What had been going on in wartime France?

After France surrendered, Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s propaganda chief, saw the French as “sick and worm-eaten” and a market for cheap “corny pictures” made by German-run companies. French directors had to endure the presence of Gestapo officers in their studios. Some collaborated, some escaped abroad, usually to America. Those that resisted did so by trying to make films of the highest quality. “Les Visiteurs du Soir”, made by Mr Carné in 1942 (and which some saw as a symbol of occupied France), is a meticulously crafted film. “Paradis” has sets and costumes created regardless of cost: at the time it was the most expensive film made in France. Throughout, Mr Carné was anxious for the safety of the Jews he employed on the film; while Arletty, one of his stars, was having an affair with a German officer. An extra was arrested in the studio and never seen again. Mr Carné said he would relive that scene for ever.

While Mr Carné survived the war, a more dangerous threat to his career lay ahead in peacetime. This was the emergence of a “new wave” of French film-makers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. They made films on small budgets, shot on location to cut costs, and used non-professional actors who made up their own lines, all features that were anathema to Mr Carné. “The new wave assassinated me,” he recalled. “But then it assassinated the cinema too.”

Mr Carné was not killed off. He made more than a dozen films after “Paradis”, but most were either dismissed by critics or, perhaps worse, received token praise from those reluctant to knock him. As a film-maker he came to be thought of as a poorfinancial risk. The backers of “Mouche”, promised as a new “Paradis”, withdrew after shooting started, and the film was never made.

He was further wounded when critics turned to his early career in the 1930s. This period is regarded as a golden age of French cinema. Mr Carné worked as an assistant to two of the most gilded directors, René Clair and Jacques Feyder, and then made a number of much-praised pictures of his own, among them “Le Jour se Lève” (also on some “best” lists). Mr Carné’s detractors now suggested that his films of this period owed more to the scriptwriter, Jacques Prévert, than to the director. Prévert, a poet as well as a scriptwriter, did make his own mark on Mr Carné’s films. His dialogue captured the drifting hopelessness of France in the 1930s. “Cinema and poetry are almost the same thing,” he said. But he thought of himself as simply one of the large team assembled by Mr Carné. “He is a great director,” Prévert said, “and an extraordinarily modest man.” The modest Marcel Carné never claimed for “Paradis” that it was the world’s best. It was enough to have made a good film, he said. “Too much praise only creates enemies for you.”