“Year after year…the number of prizes given to films and actors increases around the world.” That was the plausible claim made in the April 13, 1949, edition Le Bourgogne Républicain, which then went on that, “even though the great majority of global spectators are women, until now there has never been such a prize chosen by women, judged from the feminine point of view.” All of that had just changed, with the first Grand Prix Féminin, sponsored by the French fashion magazine, Elle.
That this was the first such prize was all the more remarkable, because there had been other similar awards in the arts for many years. 1904, for example, marked the first year of the Prix Fémina in literature, sponsored, as in the case of the later prize in cinema, by a woman’s magazine, in this case La Vie Heureuse. In one well-known instance, Roland Dorgelès won the Prix Fémina in 1919, for his anti-war novel, Les Croix de Bois, withsome critics complaining that he also should have received the even more prestigious Prix Goncourt, which went, instead, to Marcel Proust for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the second volume of À la recherches du temps perdu.
Newspapers in 1949 time treated the film prize as a major story, because Elle was such an important magazine, and also because the jury for the award was something of a who’s who of women in French arts, literature, and culture. Among the dozen or so members, there was Hélene Gordon-Lazareff, the journalist who had founded Elle; the painter Nora Auric (who was married to composer Georges Auric); Marie-Louise Bousquet, the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar as well as being credited with “discovering” Christian Dior; the actresses France Roche and Juliette Verneuil; the journalist, politician, and editor of Elle, Françoise Giroud; and the internationally famous fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.
All of the judges met on the rue Beaujolais at the very chic restaurant Véfour (which is still there today) and decided on the inaugural winners. They gave a number of awards, with Jean Simmons winning Best Foreign Actress for Hamlet (1948) and James Mason Best Foreign Actor for Huit heures de surcis (Odd Man Out [1947]). There were also awards in categories that reflected the jurors’ interest in style and fashion. They named Gabrielle Dorziat “the most elegant actress on the stage,” Edwige Feuillère “the most elegant…on the screen,” and Hélène Perdrière as “the most elegant in Paris.” The jurors chose Pierre Fresnay the Best French Actor for his performance in Monsieur Vincent (1947), and Le Miracle de la 34me rue (Miracle on 34th Street [1947]) as the Best Foreign Film, but the big winner in that first ceremony was Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles (1948). Dorziat won as Best French Actress for her role in the movie, and the film itself was named Best French Film.
Cocteau had adapted his film about intense family disfunction from his play of the same name, and it had been understood as a modern, difficult classic as soon as it opened in Paris in December 1948. The film premiered simultaneously in three of the important cinémas d’exclusivité in the city, the Aubert-Palace in the ninth arrondissement, the Gaumont-Théâtre in the second arrondissement, and the Colisée in the eighth, on the Champs-Élysées. Les Parents Terribles left those cinemas after an almost two-month run, opened again soon at several other significant locations, and played fairly steadily throughout Paris and the rest of France. The review of the film in V in 1948 stands out as representative, admiring Cocteau’s vision while unsure whether or not a responsible viewer could fully endorse such a movie. V called Les Parents Terribles “a magnificent transposition of the play, cinematically adapted in the most subtle, intelligent way.” But then the review hedged a bit before a final endorsement, saying that “one can like it or not, but one cannot help but be in awe of the splendid results achieved by Cocteau.”
In other words, the jurors for Le Prix Féminin awarded a complicated, controversial film. The prizes as a whole, though, demonstrated the broad range of the jurors’ judgements; it’s hard to imagine two films so distinctly different from each other as the sweet, feel-good Miracle de la 34me rue, the Best Foreign Film winner, and Les Parents Terribles.
Elle magazine sponsored the awards in 1950 as well, with many of the same jurors but also some new additions, such as the lawyer Suzanne Blum. Alida Valli, Danièle Dejorme, Gregory Peck, and Bernard Blier won the acting awards, and the jurors gave a special prize to the young boy who co-starred in Le Voleur de bicyclette (Ladri de biciclette [1948]), Enzo Staiola. The awards were still a major news story, but this time, some perhaps predictable snarkiness had crept into the reporting.
Writing in L’Aurore in February, 1950, Claude Lazurick-Garson, herself a member of the jury, complained that the prize for Best Foreign Film had been split between Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Louisiana Story (1948) because of, “by nature, the indecisive feminine sex.” She complained that the women, “tired of being pushed around at Christian Dior’s atelier,” had “refused to award the prize for the best dressed French actress because none of them deserved it.” Some of the jurors had fought hard for Marlene Dietrich in this category, but she “was declared too American,” which Lazurick-Garson thought “curious for a German.” Finally, the reporter/jurist informed readers that Ingrid Bergman had been put forward as a Best Foreign Actress nominee, but one of the judges (perhaps Lazurick-Garson herself) “arose to say that it was not enough to have an illegitimate child to be a big star,” a reference to Bergman’s affair with Italian director Roberto Rosselini and the birth of their son, Renato.
Regardless of any arguments about Dietrich and Bergman, the plan, at least according to Lazurick-Garson, was to have another Prix Féminin the following year. I haven’t found evidence for any such awards for 1951, or any year after that, although this might be because of the scant availability of materials from the 1950s, for example the newspapers that might have reported on the prize. But even if the Prix Féminin lasted only for two years, the award nevertheless marked a significant instance of French film culture. The cinephilia of the period has been well documented, but the record is always a masculinist one. There is Henri Langlois, so important to the ciné-club movement and then as a founder of the Cinèmatheque Française. Then there are the young men at the ciné-clubs during the postwar period and during the first years of Cahiers du Cinèma: Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut first and foremost, both of them under the tutelage of the great historian and theorist André Bazin.
Despite this still powerful mythology, there were also, always, women deeply involved in all aspects of French cinema from the period. Some of them were among the most famous names in French cinema, for instance the filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who was such a tireless champion of ciné-clubs throughout the period. There were also women who are practically unknown today, such as Lucie Derain, who followed Dulac and who was just as much an enthusiastic promoter programmer of the clubs.
In addition, we have those women who gathered at the restaurant Véfour and who were so important to so many fields—journalism, literature, fashion, politics, law—and who sought to acknowledge the best in cinema. They were the women of the Prix Féminin, who for two years at least, if not more, gave a prize that was understood as being of national importance. Certifying the significance of Cocteau or appreciating the simpler pleasures of Le Miracle de la 34me rue, they asserted the place of women in French film culture, the power of Elle magazine beyond fashion, and their own role as tastemakers and critics equal to the men who have been far better remembered and celebrated in film history.
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