Cocteau has been an innovator, a fashionable one, whose artificialities have always made him open to ridicule; and now that he's getting on, abuse yaps at his heels. But that's not to say that he has not been truly a poet and also that less definable thing a fascinator. His understanding of poetry has always had more than a touch of Chan Canasta. He dazzles with a few absurd props; he brings it off; how does he do it? We have been lured as by some perfect sleight of hand or feat on the high wire. An impossible lightness, a transparent charm, together with the situation to curdle one's blood, have set him apart from contemporaries: and so far as publicity goes, he has no more dined off it than Epstein. His last film, then, should ideally have completed the flourish from Sang d'un Poète to the...