Revival in France

At the Pathe Studios in Joinville, a suburb of Paris, dozens of nail-straighteners were hard at work last week. With new nails scarce or unobtainable, their labors were needed to make scenery for a movie to be called L'Assassin Chantait. In Paris offices, French cinemagnates and U.S. and British moneymen were equally busy making deals and filling the French movie world with rumors of great things to come.

Throughout that world, everybody is passionately working and planning. Pathe is readying Le Bataillon du Ciel, whose real-life hero will be chief of French parachutists, one-armed Colonel Bourgoin. Gaumont plans to have Jean Cocteau direct his own La Belle et la Bete, assisted by ace director Marcel Pagnol. Artist Films is planning productions of Maupassant's Boule de Suif and Dostoevsky's Idiot. In Nice, Jacqueline Audry is directing France's sensational new eight-year-old Conrad in Les Malheurs de Sophie.

Occupation Masterpiece. Remarkably enough, the French cinema industry never really went under during the Occupation until, in May 1944, Allied bombings forced the Germans to shut off its light and power. Still more remarkably, several of the films produced during the Occupation represent a triumphant defense of national style and integrity, as U.S. cinemaddicts will probably soon have a chance to see. But it is still uncertain how soon, or in what form, the most notable of these films, Les Enfants du Paradis, will reach the U.S.

A story of the Paris theater in 1848, Les Enfants du Paradis was made by the brilliant team which produced Port of Shadows and Daybreak--small, elegant Director Marcel Carne and weedy, irrepressible Writer Jacques Prevert. Its stars include Jean-Louis Barrault and Pierre Brasseur, who emerge from four years' darkness as two of the greatest French actors of their generation. According to TIME Correspondent Sherry Mangan, the film "sums up, crowns and finishes off" the great French cinematic tradition "in the way Joyce's Ulysses did for the novel." "It is," cabled Mangan, "the most expensive (some 60,000,000 francs--about five times the average), longest (3 1/4 hours), heaviest cast (3,000) and most unexceptionable film the smooth French have ever turned out."

"I Want to Go Back." In Hollywood, meanwhile, the great master of the prewar French cinema, Rene Clair, summed things up for himself and his fellow expatriates, Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier: "I want to go back. You can make films you can't make here. People in America go to the theater to see people, not ideas."

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