"The old myths can be reborn without their heroes knowing it," Cocteau explained his title, taken from Nietzsche. Thus he gives us (without their knowing it) a contemporary Tristan in the person of Jean Marais, sporting a pullover with a medieval-looking Jacquard pattern; and Isolde in the form of Madeleine Sologne, a languid vision in white. The country chateau of her husband (his uncle) is the setting for passion thwarted with the help of a malevolent dwarf (odiously and marvelously portrayed by Piéral). The Eternal Return was both a critical success and a popular diversion during the worst days of the Occupation (pullovers like Marais' became the rage in men's haberdashery); less so after the war, when foreign critics found it disquietingly Germanic (although the Tristan legend was in fact French in origin) and more than a tad morbid. Though directed by Jean Delannoy, it has that mixture of classic and contemporary, bad-taste and beautiful, that is the mark of Cocteau.