Directed by Pierre Billon,but now Cocteau's touch can be felt here there and everywhere.Cocteau had everytime loved to adapt nice lit classics:"l'éternel retour" was a modern transcription of "Tristan and Iseut";"Beauty and the Beast" ,his masterpiece,tackled Madame Leprince de Beaumont's fairy-tale;Later Madame de la Fayette's "la princesse de Clèves" was brought to the screen .Here Victor Hugo's "Ruy Blas".Jean Marais is ideal as the romantic hero,and he forms with Danielle Darrieux a couple the crowds should easy dream of.That type of queen-and-jack couple,we will search it again in "l'aigle à deux têtes",except that the jack has been replaced by an anarchist,but that does not create a large difference when you're depicting romantic passion.The setting in the palace are as extravagant as in any of another Cocteau creations.Billon ,avoiding filmed scene production style,gets his camera out of it and achieves nice zone shots in the torrent.Jean Marais plays two roles like in "Beauty and the beast",but his part of a brigand who resembles the student/jack like a brother is not as convincing.
There are oddities about RUY BLAS. The strangest aspect of all is that the tale was written by one of France's best writers, Victor Hugo, but it is about the court of traditional foe Spain.The equally odd love tale sees the Spanish queen (played by the pretty Danielle Darrieux) fall in love with, and kiss, Jean Marais, a type of D'Artagnan (minus the swashbuckling prowess), of modest background who rises through the ranks to court general secretary thanks to the queen's favor and at the expense of a lookalike duke. The latter goes to jail in the wake of machinations by some unsavoury characters in the Spanish court.The storyline is somewhat reminiscent of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (US 1937), the ending recalls ROMEO AND JULIET, and there is something Errol Flynn/ SEA HAWK-like about Jean Marais' role as the jailed duke.Although Pierre Billon is the film's official director, there is no doubt that Jean Cocteau (then Marais' lover) was highly influential, especially over the photography, which keeps highlighting Marais' physical beauty, to the very final shot, often in a manner reminiscent of LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE.An interesting aside is that Marais, as court secretary, conveys his Spanish fervor by regretting the loss of Portugal and Brazil. Well, I beg to differ. Thank God for the existence of those two Portuguese-speaking countries. And it is also odd, if not downright curious that Hugo, as a French national, could want that one of his country's main foes (Spain) could control spaces that France, too, tried to defeat on different occasions.Ultimately, this is a watchable flick, but of tiny historical import, and not much in terms of acting, direction or script.
Soundtrack
