These notes accompany screenings of Marcel Pagnol’s Cesar on December 8, 9, and 10 in Theater 3.

Although Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) directed 18 films, his identity as a cinema auteur is a little hard to pin down. Some of his best work was done in filmed adaptations of his stage plays, several of which were directed by others. He had a hand in writing all of the movies he directed, but he also wrote screenplays for others. To top it off, he was also a producer with his own studio. (I also found it intriguing to discover that he married a woman named Jacqueline Bouvier at age 50, only eight years before Jack Kennedy married another woman by that name).

There has always been an element of tension between film and its theatrical roots. Early film directors often sprang from the melodramatic Victorian stage. D. W. Griffith, although well versed in the literary canon of Dickens, Poe, etc., had been essentially a transient stage actor who stumbled into his seminal role as film director at Biograph in 1908. To the very end of his career, his films oscillated between 19th-century theatrical conventions (refined and made more subtle by Griffith’s peerless stable of actors) and the spectacle made accessible by the virtually limitless possibilities of the cinema. Similarly, Cecil B. DeMille, although more successful than Griffith through his association with David Belasco, had appeared on and written plays for the same stages. However, when DeMille caught the film bug, his first impulse was to travel to the wide open spaces of the West, where he filmed The Squaw Man (1914).

Laurence Olivier, however worshipful of William Shakespeare’s words he may have been, made the dichotomy explicit (and earned himself a special Oscar) with the first film he directed, Henry V (1945). He began with a faithful recreation of the Globe Theater, with painted flats and limited space, and then opened up the production to the glories of cinematic spectacle, transporting his audience to the battlefields of France, where huge armies replaced a few stage extras—it was an implicit acknowledgment of the limitations of theater, no matter how artfully contrived. While I believe there is plenty of room for all kinds of films, I must honestly confess to a certain prejudice in favor of spectacle. For example, I am moved more viscerally and emotionally by the cavalry troop passing through Monument Valley during a thunderstorm in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) than by the brilliant cocktail banter between Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932).

Marcel Pagnol welcomed the arrival of sound film thusly: “The art of the theatre is reborn under another form and will realize unprecedented prosperity. A new field is open to the dramatist, enabling him to produce works that neither Sophocles, Racine, nor Molière had the means to attempt.” From the very beginning of his work in film, he asserted his intention of pursuing his career as a dramatist on celluloid, largely dismissing what the cinema had achieved in the silent era. His Marius Trilogy consisted of Marius (directed by Alexander Korda in 1931), Fanny (directed by Marc Allegret in 1932), and Cesar (directed by Pagnol himself in 1936). These films, regardless of brilliant performances by major actors like Raimu, Orane Demazis, and Pierre Fresnay, strike me as truly authentic depictions of the Marseilles subculture. Taken together with his several versions of Topaze, these films succeeded in preserving Pagnol’s work as a playwright, and, in the process, made a contribution to the art of film, even if that was far from his intention. It is not unfair to say that he anticipated the Italian Neorealism of a decade later. In fact, Pagnol’s Marseilles studio was used for the filming of Jean Renoir’s Toni (1934), often also cited as a precursor of Neorealism. Renoir’s assistant was a young man named Luchino Visconti, who went on to direct Ossessione (The Postman Always Rings Twice) (1942) and La terra trema (1947), two of the cornerstones of the movement.