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24 heures de la vie d'un clown

  • 1946
  • 18m
IMDb RATING
6.2/10
826
YOUR RATING
24 heures de la vie d'un clown (1946)
DocumentaryShort

A day in the life of Beby the clown. Filmed between shows at Circus Medrano, at home and in the streets of Paris, with his faithful partner and friend the clown Maïss.A day in the life of Beby the clown. Filmed between shows at Circus Medrano, at home and in the streets of Paris, with his faithful partner and friend the clown Maïss.A day in the life of Beby the clown. Filmed between shows at Circus Medrano, at home and in the streets of Paris, with his faithful partner and friend the clown Maïss.

  • Director
    • Jean-Pierre Melville
  • Writer
    • Jean-Pierre Melville
  • Stars
    • Louis Maïss
    • Beby
    • Jean-Pierre Melville
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.2/10
    826
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • Writer
      • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • Stars
      • Louis Maïss
      • Beby
      • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • 8User reviews
    • 7Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos

    Top cast3

    Edit
    Louis Maïss
    • Clown
    • (as Maïss)
    Beby
    • Clown
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    • Narrator
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • Writer
      • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews8

    6.2826
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    Featured reviews

    5Pjtaylor-96-138044

    Clowning around.

    '24 Hours In The Life Of A Clown (1946)' is a short film that looks at, well, 24 hours in the life of a clown. Starting and ending at 11.50pm, the film chronicles a day in the life of a circus performer. It starts just as he's about to finish his shift, follows him home, sees him wake up and go about his daily business, before it finishes with a showcase of his evening performance. All the while, the inky noir narration gives us little insights that the visuals do not, more or less communicating the central character's backstory and relationship with his craft. Despite a few humorous moments and a generally fairly charming vibe, the overall affair is actually rather dull. The filmmaking is fairly straightforward, although there are a handful of scenes that are more artfully presented, and the scripting is very matter-of-fact. It's almost as if the flick is trying to seem like a typical documentary, but most of it is clearly staged and there are some jokes sprinkled throughout the otherwise dry narration. I don't think much of it could be considered 'fly on the wall', but it's unclear to what extent it has been manufactured. Ultimately, this is a fairly uninspiring effort. It isn't bad, but there just isn't all that much to it. It's fine.
    Mozjoukine

    What it says.

    This passable forties French short, presumably aimed at cinema first halves, has little visible connection with the work which made it's director famous. It's hard to imagine the little dog which has been trained to take up the praying position in any of Jean Pierre Melville's features.

    It follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner.

    Routine production values.

    Fans of the dour Melville will doubtless find something of interest.
    6gavin6942

    24 Hours in the Life of a Clown

    Follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner.

    Melville, if known at all, is best remembered for "Le Silence de la Mar" and the incredible "Le Samourai". He is not known so much for short films in the 1940s that involve French clowns. And yet, that is what we have here.

    Is this a documentary or staged? Probably a bit of both. It appears the people involved were truly the clowns they were portraying, but the actual setup may have been slightly scripted. One suspects that not every day involves looking through an old scrapbook.
    5Quinoa1984

    well, you gotta start somewhere

    This was the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, a short about two clowns working in France in Montmarte. It's very heavily skewed on being like a documentary, but it's a little too kidding to be taken too seriously. It's clear Melville didn't have (or just decided not to go for) recorded sound, so everything, with the exception of the final clown performance on stage that the '24 hours' is leading up to, is with a narrator filling in voices and the screen directions. It's awkward and kind of stilted, even as it's meant to be cute ("Here Beby reads one of his fan letters... here Beby gets his dog to pray, since they both pray to the same God")

    It's been in obscurity for a long time and probably for good reason; it's hard for me to imagine Melville as someone who would go to a lot of clown events, and it was likely made to showcase that Melville could put something on film and present it to the public, which is fine. There is one sequence that made me smile where we see the other clown Marais changing up his make-up and a guy in the background keep changing up instruments (how he plays guitar synced up to him putting on make-up is pretty clever). But even at 18 minutes there seems like there's filler here, as we see a lot of pictures of former and/or current clowns in and out of make-up.

    It's not really bad but it's just dry stuff, meant not so much for art as to fill up some time at the theaters in the period it was made, and for Melville completists; it's included on the blu-ray for Silence de la Mer.
    7boblipton

    We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep

    It's a day in the life of the Cirque Medrano clown, Beby.

    Jean-Pierre Melviille's first movie as director would seem to be a documentary short, showing the routine of a clown and his partner. It an odd choice for a director whose movies showed men under great stress, living by their own rough, confused and sometimes self-destructive codes of behavior. Yet it is in his actions that we see how the artist creates his art. It's composed of memories of other great clowns, and the set routines of his life off the stage. Together, in the hours before their show, Beby and his partner sit at a cafe and watch life go by them, arguing over how to distill the ordinary life before them into something for their audience: something grander, something more heartfelt, something funnier.

    Is this not what Melville himself tried to do in his films? With his moral gangsters and would-be-moral flics, with his fantasy images of Manhattan and failed boxers, was he not doing the same?

    The movie is shot wild, except when Beby is on stage. There's an uncredited narrator, a man in a trenchcoat and hat following the movie's subject: the stand-in for the creator of this film, trying to understand his subject by observing his actions. He thinks he understands Beby. Does he? Is the clown simply a distorted image of the director?

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      Filmed in the Paris's Montmartre and Pigalle district, in particular:
      • The bathhouse and a sidewalk cafe in the Rue Lepic (18th).
      • The Rue des Martyrs, near the Boulevard Rochechouart (9th), location of the Medrano Circus.
    • Quotes

      Narrator: [quoting Béby] Before going to sleep, my dog and I, good Christians, always say a prayer, because in the circus, beasts and clowns share the same God. 'Dear God, allow me to continue to serve young and old, give me a long career in the sawdust ring, as necessary to me as spaghetti. In God's name, amen.'

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • 1946 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • France
    • Language
      • French
    • Also known as
      • 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown
    • Filming locations
      • Paris, France
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      18 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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