Black Orpheus (Dispatfilm-Gemma; Lopert) is perhaps the most impressive can of film so far cast up on U.S. shores by the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) of creation that has swept across the French movie industry. It is an amazing creation. The picture was made by Marcel Camus,* a 47-year-old assistant to some of France's top directors. In 1957 he found an adaptation of the Orpheus legend by a Brazilian poet and playwright named Vinicius de Moraes (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956), and for the hell of it he used the wildly poetic mountains around Rio de Janeiro, where thousands of Negroes live in conditions of infernal poverty among scenes of paradisal beauty.
In Brazil, Director Camus soon ran out of money. He slept on the beach to save hotel bills, lived from meal to meal, worked from reel to reel. Down to his last $17, he was rescued by Brazil's President Juscelino Kubitschek, who told the army to get him some electrical equipment. For his Orpheus, Camus hired a handsome Brazilian futebol player named Breno Mello, for his Eurydice an unknown dancer from Pittsburgh with serenely lovely looks and a name that nobody could possibly forget: Marpessa Dawn. "The poverty," says Camus, "was not such a bad thing in the long run. I spent so much time trailing around on foot, just looking, that in the end I had a deep awareness of Brazil. With money, I would never have made the same film. Everything would have been done too quickly."
Shown in France, the picture delighted the public, astonished the critics, won the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes. Part of its appeal, no doubt, derives from the timeless charm of the old legend itself, which Scenarist Jacques Viot has adapted simply and gracefully. Orpheus is a Rio streetcar conductor; Eurydice is a village girl who comes to the big city to visit her cousin and to escape from a sinister stranger who wants to kill her. They fall in love and go down to the city together to celebrate the carnival in the streets. There her enemy, who is Death, seeks her out and carries her away. Orpheus, heartbroken, goes looking for his lost love at the Bureau of Missing Persons, then at a diabolic rite where spirit-rappers summon up her ghost. In the end, he joins her in death.