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Les Enfants du Paradis (Pathe-Tricolore) is the most ambitious, most expensive (about 60,000,000 francs) and longest (just under three hours) movie the French have thus far turned out (TIME, March 19, 1945). It is also probably the Frenchest. In production for three years and three months, most of the time during the German occupation, the film crackles with an undiluted Gallicism that is its most winning characteristic.

Long since a box-office hit in Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands and Italy, Les Enfants is now running for its second year in French cinema houses. It has been trimmed for U.S. audiences, given English titles and billed as Children of Paradise.*

A long-winded story about theatrical life, the film is as crowded as the busiest Balzac novel with people, city noises, brawling and lovemaking (see BOOKS). The setting, too, is Balzacian: the sprawling plot tries to keep up with half a dozen leading characters as they move through 1848 Paris. But the film's makers, using their own script, lacked Balzac's gift for tying up dangling ends and giving a finished story some look of significance.

Attempting--and persisting in--production of such a pretentious movie, while the Nazis strutted through Pathe's Joinville studio, was the amazing accomplishment of France's smoothest movie team: small, elegant Director Marcel Carne and tousled Writer Jacques Preevert (Hotel du Nord, Le Jour se Leve). U.S. moviegoers, unaccustomed to concentrated mixtures of sex, cynicism and murky symbolism, may enjoy the picture's sharply witty individual scenes and wonder what they all add up to. The overall theme might boil down to this: "Life is a tragicomedy, whether viewed from an expensive seat or from the peanut gallery. Better just chuckle and enjoy it--if you can manage to hold back the tears."

Les Enfants affords U.S. moviegoers a good, long look at several of France's outstanding actors: Jean-Louis Barrault (a graceful, desperate-faced pantomimist currently playing on the Paris stage in Andre Gide's translation of Hamlet), bouncy Pierre Brasseur and Arletty, a sort of healthy, worldly Mona Lisa who exudes a mature type of sex appeal that Hollywood has always ignored.

So Dark the Night (Columbia) is a low-budget whodunit that almost succeeds in making the big time. In spite of a wobbly script and a cast of unknown players, Director Joseph H. Lewis has turned out a neat little job. It is more entertaining than most of the better-advertised movies it will get paired with on double-feature bills.

Moving at a leisurely pace that makes its sensationalism even more feverish, the plot of So Dark the Night lets young love struggle against middle-aged wealth, throws in a couple of violent murders, winds up in a fanfare of abnormal psychology. It just goes to show that thoughtful direction and handsome camera work can lift a mediocre movie a long way above its humble beginnings.

* A misleading translation: paradis is French slang for a theater's cheapest, topmost balcony seats. More idiomatic translation: The Kids in the Peanut Gallery.

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