Beauty of the Devil (1950)
Rene Clair's "Beauty of the Devil"
In the early 1930s, Rene Clair had helped pave the way for the new poetic realist movement in France. Two whole decades later, Clair's career was not exactly where one would expect such a significant contributor to an entire cinematic convention. Clair went from his successes in the early 1930s to such failures that he fled to the United Kingdom to make even more failures. When he attempted to return in 1939, war had broken out and Clair had to flee to America to make Hollywood pictures, only to middling success. After the war, Clair returned to France to begin anew once again and regain control over his cinematic practices. With this, he loosely adapted the classic German folktale of "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into his 1950 film "Beauty of the Devil."
The story of "Beauty of the Devil" has been told time and time again: a man gives his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in order to gain eternal youth. However, in doing so, he submits himself to the great evils that lie at the heart of humanity. In Clair's rendition of the classic tale, we journey through the assorted lengths every soul would go through in order to attain power, wealth, glory, fame, etc. With this provided structure, we see a contemporary world as well. In one of the more prominent storylines, the prince and his oligarchs use the working class as laborers to mine sand from the earth to make gold. The continued desire for this gold and for wealth and power in general only create more suffering for those who must enact the whims of these men. In the end, the gold turns back into sand, signaling that all the wealth you attempted to accumulate was hollow and meaningless. After coming directly out of the second World War, it seems worthy to note that these same ideas could be applied. The powerful leaders of the globe attempt to complete takeover, much to the determent of humanity itself. In the end, their quests only amounted to nothing but death and destruction. I'm sure this did not go unbeknownst by Clair and his writing partner when outlining the story.
I very much enjoyed the film. It beautiful constructed the thematic points of its original source material while also fermenting in joyous revelry of modernist outlooks. My only critique of the film is the 'happy ending' it provides to our Professor Faust, who gets away mostly unscathed from his dalliances with the devil. I would have preferred the more tragic ending of bearing the responsibility for one's actions, rather than a deus ex machina moment of final liberation. That being said, I still very much enjoyed the film and saw it as a fitting end to Clair's career. Yes, I know that Clair would go on to continue making films in France for the decade. But, after the success of "Beauty of the Devil," Clair and his work would become synonymous for the old-fashioned and stagnant establishment of French cinema in the 1950s. As "Cahiers du Cinema" gained in popularity and its Nouvelle-Vague sentiments about evolving film, Clair and his work would be out the door rapidly.
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