France

Jean Marais, María Casares, François Périer, Marie Déa, Juliette Gréco

96 min

1950-09-29

At the Café des Poètes in Paris, a fight breaks out between the poet Orphée (Jean Marais) and a Set of resentful upstarts. A rival poet, Cègeste (Edouard Dermit), is murdered, and a mysterious princess (María Casares) insists upon shooting Orpheus and away the body within her rollsroyce. Orphée soon finds himself in the underworld. Orpheus leaks in the car back to the land of the living to eventually become obsessed with the automobile radio. This film is the fundamental element of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).