My Impressions

To me the "over the top" or stylized acting worked, due to the fairy tale nature of the story. (Look at another film with "large" performances, MGM's classic musical version of THE WIZARD OF OZ.) It's hard, today, to judge the impact the make-up had on audiences of the time. (On its initial release, the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, with Boris Karloff, shocked audiences of the day nearly as much as THE EXORCIST did some 3 decades later. When the special edition of THE EXORCIST was recently reissued into theatres to celebrate its anniversary, I noticed a large percentage of the audience were teenagers, most of whom found the film more humorous than horrifying.) We seem to grow more jaded with each passing age, and so it is probably safe to say that films we view today as cutting edge or horrifying (although I doubt that was the goal Cocteau had for his film) will, in future generations, be viewed as rather low-tech.

this was filmed during WW2 and remeber the scene with all of those sheets out to dry, do you know how hard it must've been for them, I mean this is a very low buget film, but I loved all of it. and they probably made the beast the beast that they could and I couldn't imagine him looking any other way as costume.

Context is vital. Consider other movies made at that time--the acting standard. At this point in time, we were not that many years removed from the silent film, or the stage, for that matter. It was a younger genre. Perhaps, one reason I can so easily savor the magic of this film is that it is so faithful to the original fairy tale. The message has greater weight than the characters, who seem one-dimensional to our 21st century eyes. In any case, the movie takes us on a fantastic journey that still lives in my dreams.

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I thought it was rubbish and I'm 78 and saw it the at cinema when it first came out.