Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête was not the first screen adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s story — there are at least two from the silent era that are wholly or partially lost — but the 1946 film set the standard for most that came after. These include Disney’s animated feature and its pointless live-action remake, as well as the French version I covered in 2017. Some notable exceptions are one made in Czechoslovakia in 1978, in which the Beast has a decidedly avian look and a feral attitude to match, and one made in the good old USA in 1962, which boasts solid make-up effects by Jack Pierce, who designed the werewolves in Universal’s Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man a couple decades earlier.
Directed by Edward L. Cahn, best known for such low-budget creature features as Creature with the Atom Brain, The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer-Men, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, 1962’s Beauty and the Beast was his only film in color — and Technicolor to boot. Instead of crediting Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, its screenplay was “suggested by the Ancient Legend,” which is fair considering writers George Bruce and Orville H. Hampton wildly deviate from the source material. In fact, its Beast is entirely blameless when it comes to the curse that causes him to shun his subjects every night from dusk until dawn, making him a subject of gossip since he has his castle cleared out on a nightly basis.
This is the situation encountered by Lady Althea (Joyce Taylor) who’s traveling with her father, the Count of Sardi (Dayton Lummis), to be married to Duke Eduardo (Mark Damon), whose attempts to push her away only strengthen her ardor. Besides, he has other things on his mind, chiefly the suspicions of his uncle, Prince Bruno (Michael Pate), who’d like nothing more than to replace him on the throne. When Bruno’s spy Grimaldi (Walter Burke) starts digging up dirt on the Duke, he and his chancellor, Orsini (Eduard Franz), step up their efforts to find the chamber where the sorcerer who placed the curse on Eduardo was entombed alive. This, incidentally, only comes after Althea and her father are in the picture, a necessity considering she walked in on him in his beastly state her second night in the castle. (You’ve heard of love at first sight? Well, how about fright at first sight?)
Much like Eduardo tries to hide his affliction from the world, Cahn keeps his furry form under wraps at the start, only showing the effects of the transformation on his hands. The second night, Cahn starts on his hands again, but also shows Damon’s face as Pierce transforms him over the course of a handful of dissolves into the Beast, who looks like Lon Chaney Jr.’s shaggier cousin. Considering this came along one year after Oliver Reed’s Leon in The Curse of the Werewolf, it’s disappointing that Damon’s Eduardo is so subdued. He may in fact be the silver screen’s first depressed werewolf, spending all his Beast time in his own dungeon feeling sorry for himself instead of admiring his ample chest hair.
