What do the following movies have in common?

• Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or;

• Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis;

• Orson Welles’s Othello;

• Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes;

• Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, Kiss Me, Stupid and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes;

• Stanley Donen’s Once More, with Feeling!;

• Fred Zinnemann’s Behold a Pale Horse;

• William Wyler’s How To Steal A Million;

• Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals;

• John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King;

• Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni;

• Piers Haggard’s The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu;

• Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon and ‘Round Midnight; and

• Luc Besson’s Subway

They were all designed by the amazing Alexandre Trauner (1906-1993). Trauner, who was Jewish, spent the Occupation in hiding and had to work on the film in secret (as did composer Joseph Kosma and many others in the cast and crew).

In today’s clip, Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) clashes with the authors of his latest play:

It’s worth nothing that all four of the major male characters in Les Enfants du Paradis are based on real people. Frédérick Lemaître (1800-1879) appeared in a melodrama, L’Auberge des Arts, that was so badly received that starting the second night he played it as farce; it became his biggest success.

Speaking of designers, obviously this guy must have been in the audience that night.

More of Les Enfants du Paradis.

Technorati tags: Les Enfants du Paradis, Children of Paradise, French cinema, Marcel Carné, Jacques Prévert, Pierre Brasseur, Alexandre Trauner, Honoré Daumier