Customer Reviews

Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema

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For those interested in the films of Marcel Carné, this makes a fine introduction, with quite detailed analysis of political and sexual subtexts, rather a bit heavy on Freudian-style psychoanalytic film theory to my own non-film scholarly POV. "Les enfants du paradis", being Carné's most famous and greatest film, gets the lion's share of the book space, with Turk devoting multiple chapters to it. The coverage of his films post-"Les enfants du paradis" gets pretty short shrift, perhaps reflecting the variable quality of those films (generally accepted to be a steep decline post-1945). The earlier films definitely get greater discussion, from "Drole de Drame" through "Les enfants du paradis", again reflecting their status in French cultural history.

As a bit of a side note, and regarding the "dated" comment in the header, at the time of publication of this book, both Carné and Roland Lesaffre were still alive. For all of Turk's discussion of gay issues in the films and how Carné couldn't be forthright about his homosexuality in the climate of the times, the book sidesteps the full nature of the relationship between Carné and Lesaffre, where it is now more open that the two of them weren't just artistic collaborators, but were more to each other in real life off the movie set. They are now both buried in the same plot.