Marais, tall and with a great shock of hair, cuts a fine figure as the famous man. Francois Perier, as the chauffeur, plays the second most important character in the play, although we realize that only belatedly. Marie Dea uses some nice, almost comic, timing after returning from the dead, in a series of scenes where Orpheus almost but not quite looks at her.
The film is not perfect. A subplot involving Eurydice's involvement with Aglaonice (Juliette Greco) and her "League of Women" is left hanging. The weakness in the cast is Maria Casares, as the Princess, death's embodiment. She lacks the presence for the role. Despite all the tricks of costuming and makeup, she is slight and inconsequential. Cocteau wanted either Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, and to imagine either one as the Princess is to see the film with its final piece in place. (There is a moment that would have become famous if performed by either one; after the tribunal abruptly disappears, the Princess turns to the chauffeur and observes, "If this were our former world, I'd say, `Let's have a drink.' ")
One of the pleasures of the film is to see how audacious the tricks are in their simplicity. Rubber gloves leap onto hands in reverse photography. Glass jumps back into its frame. Mirrors are sometimes mirrors and sometimes sets on the other sides of mirrors. As characters emerge from mirrors, Cocteau simply cuts to their hands being lifted from a still pool of water that still reflects their faces. Just once he uses a technique he also used in "Beauty and the Beast," where a character is pulled on a wheeled platform we cannot see, so that he appears to be gliding.
The characters themselves are never overplayed, never too dramatic, never reaching for classical effects as if they knew they were in a Greek myth. The humor, when it comes, is dry. Certain lines, not too many, employ Cocteau's own poetic language. The best is: "Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you'll see death do its work."
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