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In a small mid-European kingdom in the 19th century, a young anarchist who happens to be the perfect look-alike of the dead king, breaks into the palace in order to kill the queen, but falls in love with her. Pauline Kael has characterized Jean Cocteau’s ‘The Two-Headed Eagle’ as an inversion of Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. On surface, this is true: In ‘Beauty’, the heroine awakens the handsome, good man lurking within the beast, while in ‘Eagle’ it is the woman who is aroused from her spell by the hero. Although Cocteau’s cinematic sense is too great to make the film look stagey, the screenplay smacks too much of the theatre. It is the most minor of his own directed films. ‘Il Mistero di Oberwald’ (The Mystery of Oberwald) directed by Michelangelo Antonioni was based on ‘The Two Headed Eagle’.
Credits: Producer, Georges Dancigers, Alexandre Mnouchkine ; director, Jean Cocteau ; writer, Jean Cocteau ; photography, Christian Matras ; music, Georges Auric ; art direction, Christian Berard, Georges Wakhevitch ; stills photographer, Raymond Voin
Cast: Edwige Feuillere, Jean Marais, Jean Debucourt, Jacques Varennes, Silvia Monfort, Yvonne de Bray.
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How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
X000292
Languages
English
French
Subject category
Foreign language films
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Black and White
Holdings
16mm film; Limited Access Print (Section 2)