It is June 1940, during the Battle of France.[4] After five-year-old Paulette's parents and pet dog die in a German air attack on a column of refugees fleeing Paris, the traumatized child meets 10-year-old Michel Dollé whose peasant family takes her in.[4] She quickly becomes attached to Michel. The two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery among the ruins of an abandoned watermill,[4] where they bury her dog and start to bury other animals, marking their graves with crosses stolen from a local graveyard, including one belonging to Michel's brother. Michel's father first suspects that Michel's brother's cross was stolen from the graveyard by his neighbour. Eventually, the father finds out that Michel has stolen the cross.
Meanwhile, the French gendarmes come to the Dollé household in order to take Paulette. Michel cannot bear the thought of her leaving and tells his father that he would tell him where the stolen crosses are, but in return he should not give Paulette to the gendarmes. His father doesn't keep his promise: Michel destroys the crosses and Paulette ends up going to a Red Cross camp, but at the end of the film is seen running away into a crowd of people in the Red Cross camp, crying for Michel and then for her mother.
The film was widely praised among critics, whose "howling protests" were heard at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival where it was not an "official entry of France";[2] instead, it was "screened on the fringe of the Competition."[5]
The film was entered into competition at the 13th Venice International Film Festival; festival organizers at first considered the film ineligible because it had been screened at Cannes;[2] it ended up receiving the Golden Lion, the Festival's highest prize.
Upon its release, it was lambasted by some, who said it was a "vicious and unfair picture of the peasantry of France";[2] in France, 4,910,835 theater tickets were sold.[1] Following its December 1952 release in the United States, Bosley Crowther called it a film with "the irony of a Grand Illusion, the authenticity of a Harvest and the finesse of French films at their best"; according to Crowther, the film is a "brilliant and devastating drama of the tragic frailties of men, clear and uncorrupted by sentimentality or dogmatism in its candid view of life."[2]
Decades after its release, David Ehrenstein called it "deeply touching" and wrote: "Fossey's is quite simply one of the most uncanny pieces of acting ever attempted by a youngster. Clément’s sensitivity doubtless accounts for much of what we see here, but the rest is clearly Fossey’s own."[4]
Roger Ebert added the film to his Great Movies collection in 2005, writing: "Movies like Clement's "Forbidden Games" cannot work unless they are allowed to be completely simple, without guile, transparent. Despite the scenes I have described, it is never a tear-jerker. It doesn't try to create emotions, but to observe them."[6]
Soundtrack[]
The main theme of the soundtrack is a guitar arrangement of the melody "Romance".
Home media[]
Forbidden Games was released on Laserdisc in 1988 by Criterion Collection(under license of Turner and MGM/UA Home Video), who later also released it on DVD in 2004 by license of Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment Co.
^Herpe, Noël (8 March 2011). "France at Cannes". Cannes Film Festival. Retrieved 2012-10-07. René Clément won awards in 1946 for La Bataille du Rail, in 1949 for Au-Delà des Grilles and in 1954 for Monsieur Ripois (but oddly, not for Jeux Interdits, which was screened on the fringe of the Competition, but went on to make the entire world weep); French: René Clément se voyait récompenser en 1946 pour La Bataille du rail, en 1949 pour Au delà des grilles, en 1954 pour Monsieur Ripois (mais curieusement pas pour Jeux interdits, projeté en marge de la compétition avant de faire pleurer le monde entier...)
J. Arthur Ball / Walt Disney / Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney / Gordon Jennings, Jan Domela, Devereaux Jennings, Irmin Roberts, Art Smith, Farciot Edouart, Loyal Griggs, Loren L. Ryder, Harry D. Mills, Louis Mesenkop, Walter Oberst / Oliver T. Marsh and Allen Davey / Harry Warner (1938)
Douglas Fairbanks / Judy Garland / William Cameron Menzies / Motion Picture Relief Fund (Jean Hersholt, Ralph Morgan, Ralph Block, Conrad Nagel)/ Technicolor Company (1939)