Product Details

• Actors: Pierre Bertin, Roger Blin, Maurice Carnege, María Casares, Renée Cosima
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: June 13, 2000
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 630320208X
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128,129 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

A Parisian poet becomes seduced by the prospect of eternal fame in Jean Cocteau's jazzy 1949 update of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. The café set won't give successful Orpheus (Jean Marais) the time of day, so he obliges when the Princess of Death (Maria Casarés) orders him into her Rolls Royce with her injured young protégé. It isn't long before the poet realizes the commanding Princess is no ordinary benefactor of the arts; for one thing, she can travel through mirrors. The next day, Orpheus returns to his frantic wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) with the kindly chauffeur Heurtibise (François Périer), but remains distracted by the Princess and the cryptic messages from her car radio. The equally smitten Princess eventually takes Eurydice before her time, which results in an underworld trial about her actions. To get his wife back, Orpheus must promise to never to look at his wife, but his heart's not in it. This black-and-white film slyly explores the dark side of the creative urge with panache. Dreamy and mesmerizing, it depicts an underworld not too different from everyday life. With subtitles. --Diane Garrett

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Silence Flows Faster Backwards..., August 18, 2002

By 

Hugo 77 (TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orpheus [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Whether you think it is deep or merely whimsical, it is awfully difficult to dislike a film which starts with Death's chauffeur calling the cops because the poets are brawling at the local cafe. Jean Cocteau's Orphee (Orpheus) is possibly the most uncharacterizable film ever: neither high art nor low, and neither a recasting of the classical Orphic myth nor a refutation of the original. If anything, Orphee is in fact all of these things simultaneously, and therein lies its art.
In the original Greek myth, Orphee loses his wife and is told that he may go to the underworld and retrieve her if he takes her by the hand and never looks back. He fails at this and she is gone to him and he returns to the world of the living without her. In an affiliated legend, Orphee dies a bloody death years later but is consequently reunited with his wife Eurydice who has been waiting for him.
The original myth suggests a belief in a romantic love that endures past death, but one that specifically rewards monogamous faithfullness. But with stipulations:the reward is in the next world, with no promises regarding thisworldly happiness. Moreover, the Greeks didn't allow for what happens to the bonds formed with subsequent spouses of widowed people.
This clearly troubled Cocteau, as does his Catholic "till death do us part", wherein people are expected to never divorce or seek new lovers, and to not have mates in the afterlife. Cocteau's version is similarly unpromising with respect to thiswordly happiness, but since Heurtibise(Death's chauffeur) and Euridice secretly wish to be together, as do the "Princess"(i.e., Death) and Orphee, maybe in their failure they get what they want.
So Cocteau holds out hope in his retelling, adapting the myth to suit his purposes while he simultaneously mocks the importance of myth-making. (At one point Orphee is asked by one of the underworld judges if he is a writer. He replies that he is a poet, adding that "a poet is a writer who writes but isn't a writer.)

With Heurtebise's help(and trick photography), Orphee goes back to the underworld to retrieve his wife. When he arrives he is made to testify in some sort of trial. He thinks he is on trial at first, but it is the princess, Death who is on trial, and it is through the process of the trial that he realizes that she loves him too. Later, he says to Death-

Orphee:"Who gives the orders?"
Death:"They come to us, as if in a dream...or like the beating of jungle drums."
Orphee:"I will go to him who gives the orders."
Death:"Some think he imagines us. Others that he sleeps, and we are his dreams..."

This exchange is the closest that Cocteau comes to offering a set of religious beliefs anywhere in Orphee. (Perhaps notably, one of the nonsense verses that come across the car radio earlier tells Orphee that the dreamer must listen to his dreams.)

Cocteau is more concerned with mood than with plot per se, and I suppose this may trouble some viewers. But for me, the dream-like, atmospheric quality of this film is more than suitable compensation. The car radio is right...

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Great movie, awful print. Avoid! Get the more expensive one., February 10, 2000

By A Customer

I have seen the 'cheap' version of this movie on VHS and it is terrible. A beautiful, mesmerizing film butchered by terrible sound, a faded print, and subtitles that go off the screen. The people responsible for this should be ashamed. This edition is truly a waste of money.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece by a Master, April 3, 2000

By 

Jake Berry (Florence, AL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

No one in film moved toward a transformation of the mythic impulse for modernity more profoundly than Jean Cocteau, and this is a perfect example of that art in practice. The film's influence, along with the rest of Cocteau's work ranges far and wide. One can see it in the work of David Lynch, in last year's Sixth Sense, etc. This is a film about a poet, but it's much more, it's poetry itself.