In the beginning there was only love

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Movie
German title In the beginning there was only love
Original title Caroline chérie
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1951
length 140 (German rental version: 111) minutes
Rod
Director Richard Pottier
script Jean Anouilh
production Francois Chavane for Cinéphonic
music George Auric
camera Maurice Barry
cut Jean Feyte
occupation

In the Beginning Was Only Love (OT: Caroline chérie ) is a French feature film from 1951 with Martine Carol directed by Richard Pottier . The script is based on a novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent . The success of the film established Martine Carol as a major star of French cinema in the early 1950s and, thanks to a few nude scenes, a national sex symbol.

action

The young, fun-loving Caroline de Bièvre falls in love with the daredevil and libertine Gaston de Sallanches on July 14, 1789 at the wedding of her sister. In the turmoil of the French Revolution , Caroline is forced to endure numerous adventures in order to save her life. At times she disguises herself as a man, gets involved with a lesbian and is more or less voluntarily at the will of several men before she finally finds happiness in Gaston's arms.

background

Martine Carol was known in France mainly for her turbulent private life than for her success on the screen. The press reported often and in detail about the numerous affairs of the actress, who willingly gave information about every detail of their relationships in numerous interviews. It was not until the director and producer Christian-Jaque , whom she finally married in 1954, that Carol became a successful star. Martine Carol launched a carefully choreographed press campaign in 1950 as a candidate for the film adaptation of Cécil Saint-Laurent's novel "Carolin chérie", which was revealing at the time . The book had become a bestseller in 1947 and the expression "Caroline chérie" had become a popular word for a seductive, frivolous woman.

The great success of the film, which attracted 3,184,380 viewers in France, compared to 6,712,512 fanfan the Hussar in the following year, established Carol as the star of numerous comparable historical romances, in which at least one scene was always incorporated Martine Carol was filmed naked while bathing, swimming or sleeping. In 1953 she shot My Life for Love , the continuation of the adventures of Caroline chérie.

In Germany the film was released in a 30-minute shortened version.

Film historical significance

Martine Carol, like Silvana Pampanini , who at the same time acted more or less undressed in Italian films, was one of the first well-known stars to appear naked in front of the camera. According to Georg Seeßlen , the importance of their appearances lay in the fact that they with their appearances

"Made sex available, and by making the rite of the bare bosom an" art ", her portrayal helped to bring the erotic condition of the 1950s to a simple denominator."

Caroline chérie thus established the basic pattern of Carol's other films, mostly historical subjects, which she staged more as an object than as an independently acting subject of the plot and highlighted carefully choreographed nude scenes. Regardless of the role played, Carol was mostly that.

“Victim of male violence, and in the" Caroline chérie "films she is so often exposed to their brutality that such rape scenes have become a kind of trademark of her films. [...] Her exhibitionism [...] is the narcissism of a woman who is more in love with her own body than with her lover. [..] Because it has no instinctual goal of its own, [...] it can so easily become an object, the increase or decrease in value of which is its fate and the plot of the films. "

criticism

The magazine Der Spiegel succinctly summarizes the events of 1954:

"[The film describes how the heroine] lived the stormy years of the French Revolution between the princely four-poster bed and the sans-culottes-straw bed."

The lexicon of international film also found few nice words:

"An idiosyncratic revolutionary image based on Cecil Saint-Laurent's bestseller sneer, which is not lacking in flirtatious turbulence, but which even in the German version, which has been cut by half an hour, still drags on."

Remake

The French director Denys de La Patellière filmed the material again in 1968 with France Anglade as Caroline. See Caroline Chérie (Beautiful as Sin) .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ cf. Passek, Jean Loup (Ed.): Dictionnaire du cinéma . Paris: Larousse, 1987.
  2. ↑ cf. here: [1]
  3. ↑ cf. Susan Hayword, French Costume Drama of the 1950s: Fashioning Politics in Film, p. 82
  4. ↑ Seeßlen, Weil, Aesthetics of erotic cinema - history and mythology of erotic films, Rowohlt, 1980, p. 171
  5. ↑ Seeßlen, Weil, Aesthetics of erotic cinema - history and mythology of erotic films, Rowohlt, 1980, p. 171
  6. ↑ cf. here: [2]
  7. ↑ See quote here: [3]