Trivia for
La belle et la bête (1946) More at IMDbPro »

• The costumes were manufactured at the workshop of the famous Paris couture house of Jeanne Lanvin, with the men's costumes under the supervision of Lanvin designer Pierre Cardin
  
  
• It took five hours for Jean Marais to put on his make-up as the Beast.
  
  
• During the shooting of the film, Jean Cocteau became very ill and eventually had to be hospitalized. While he was recovering, René Clément served as the director.
  
  
• Jean Cocteau used several different kinds of film stock because of the difficulty of getting stock immediately after the war. He claimed that the different visual textures added to the poetic effect of the film.
  
  
• The stream that the Beast tries to drink from when he is weak and dying is actually a sewage runoff behind the studio.
  
  
• The effect of the candles lighting themselves as the merchant passes them was achieved by blowing them out and then running the film in reverse as he walked backward past them. The entire sequence was done in one long take and reversed - a quick glimpse of the fireplace shows the flames appearing to move downward.
  
  
• The popular song "Beauty and the Beast" by Stevie Nicks was inspired by this film. In 2007, she got the rights for the movie and it plays behind her as she sings the song. It is the last song in her set list.
  
  
• Philip Glass composed an opera perfectly synchronized to the film. The original soundtrack was eliminated, and he composed the opera to be performed along with the film projected behind the orchestra and voice talent. The compact disc recording of Glass' "La Belle et la Bête" can be played alongside the film with a very similar effect. Note: the opera is recorded on two compact discs; hence it will be necessary to pause the film once while changing discs. In the US, the second DVD release of this film by the Criterion Collection gives the viewer the option of hearing the original soundtrack or the Glass opera version, which, in a sense, gives you two movies for the price of one. Glass has composed similar works for two other Jean Cocteau films: Orphée (1950) and Les enfants terribles (1950).
  
  
• So convincing was Jean Marais underneath his make-up as the Beast, that when he was transformed at the end back to human form, Greta Garbo famously said "Give me back my Beast!"
  
  
• "On my face there's a plenty of cracks, wounds and itches and my hands are bleeding" Cocteau wrote when he was hospitalized because of a bad skin disease "but the face and the hands of Jean Marais are covered with a so painful crust that removing it is similar to suffer my treatments". In fact all the visible parts of the body of Marais were covered every morning with animal hair.
  
  

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