Red Victorian Theatre
San Francisco

Jwlhyfer de Winter organized Stitch In Time, a sewing circle that met one night each week at her home in San Francisco.  On May 21, instead of gathering to sew, members of Stitch In Time and other GBACG members attended a showing Jean Cocteau's hauntingly ethereal film, Beauty and the Beast. Everyone in the group dressed in costumes evoking the faerie tale spirit of the film.

Pauline Kael described this masterpiece of French cinema: "Jean Cocteau's first full-length movie (he wrote and directed it) is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday family life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty's farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast's enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard's makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast; Beauty's self-sacrifice to him holds no more horror than a satisfying romantic fantasy should have. The transformation of the Beast into Prince Charming is ambiguous-what we have gained cannot quite take the place of what we have lost. (When shown the film, Greta Garbo is reported to have said at the end, "Give me back my Beast.") The delicate Josette Day is, quite properly, Beauty."

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