From the opening shots of the stream of humanity flowing down Paris's famous theater street, the Boulevard du Crime (nowadays the Boulevard du Temple) in the 1840s, when pantomime and melodrama were at a height, through its delicate yet elaborate tracing of the lives of the actors and thieves who live there, Les Enfants du Paradis has the authority of a great work of art. “This is unquestionably both Carné's and Prevert's masterpiece and overflows with art and intelligence” (G. Sadoul). The story unfolds around the beautiful actress, Garance (Arletty, in her best performance), and her rival lovers, the actor Lemaitre (Pierre Brasseur), the Count de Monteray (Louis Salou), and the mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault in the role he created, like Chaplin's tramp, for all posterity). That such a rich, flamboyant work could be made during the German Occupation is amazing, but perhaps less so when one considers the film with its subtle references to the “stifling humiliation felt by all France. French film cameras never took in true life more heroically than when everybody dressed up for his part in Children of Paradise and played the evil and loss bizarrely present in himself and his haunts....” (U. Film Soc.). (JB)