Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell

Sporting Gentlemen

by E. Digby Baltzell (Author)  Format: Paperback

Tennis is a high-stakes game, played by prodigies identified early and coached by professionals in hopes of high rankings and endorsements. This commercial world is far removed from the origins of the sport. Before 1968―when Wimbledon invited professional players to compete for the first time―tennis was part of a sportsmanship tradition that emphasized character over money. It produced well-rounded gentlemen who expressed a code of honor, not commerce.

 

In this authoritative and affectionate history of men's tennis, distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the glory of the age. From its aristocratic origins in the late ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and through a succession of newcomers, the amateur era and its virtues survived a century of democratization and conflict. Sporting Gentlemen examines the greatest players and matches in the history of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots in the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American upper class.

 

This code of honor remained in spite of the later democratization of tennis. Thus, the court manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers at the Old Wimbledon were upheld to the letter by Don Budge and Jack Kramer as well as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money. For all who love the game of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is both fascinating history and a badly needed analysis of what has made the sport great.

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Core Themes and Overview

• The Code of Honor: Baltzell traces the roots of tennis etiquette back to the gentlemanly cricket code of the late-19th-century Anglo-American upper class.
• Amateur Era: The book highlights how traditional court manners survived through generations of players, from early figures like the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers to later greats like Don Budge, Jack Kramer, Rod Laver, and Arthur Ashe.
• The Open Era Critique: The final chapter delivers a critical look at modern professional tennis, arguing that commercialization and the "cult of the superstar" replaced traditional values with monetary class distinctions.

As described on Amazon, “Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money.”

 

Barbarians on the Court

 

By Stephen G. Smith

July 9, 1995

Barbarians on the Court

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/09/books/barbarians-on-the-court.html?eafs_enabled=false

July 9, 1995, Section 7, Page 11Buy Reprints

 

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

 

IN late August 1881, 25 gentlemen traveled to Rhode Island to compete in the first official lawn tennis championship of the United States. It was played at the Newport Casino, a graceful tennis complex designed by Stanford White, on Bellevue Avenue, the main strand of high society's summer capital. The players, mostly undergraduates at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn, wore trousers or knickers and long-sleeved shirts, with belts, hats and stockings bearing their club colors. For the next three decades, E. Digby Baltzell writes in "Sporting Gentlemen," the cricket-club aristocracy dominated the championships much as television does today. Play was limited to the morning hours so as not to interfere with other leisure activities; crowds were kept to 3,000, with the best seats reserved for Mrs. Astor's 400 and old-line families from Philadelphia and Boston.

 

But tennis was quickly outgrowing the cozy and complacent confines of exclusive clubs along the Eastern Seaboard and in England. By 1914, the talk of tennis was the Davis Cup, which was being contested by six nations. In what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the history of the game, the challenge round was played at Forest Hills, the new home of the West Side Tennis Club in New York. On the final day of the match between the United States and Australia, the stadium was packed with more than 12,000 cheering spectators. Their boisterous enthusiasm turned to pandemonium when Norman Brookes of Australia dropped his racquet and stuck a finger in each ear. Bottles were thrown from the stands and fans spilled onto the court, with policemen in pursuit. Tennis had been emphatically democratized. The next year the United States championships were moved from Newport to Forest Hills, and the game began an evolution that would culminate, in 1968, in the opening of the major tournaments to professionals.

 

Mr. Baltzell and Peter Bodo both view the changes with regret. In "The Courts of Babylon," Mr. Bodo, a senior writer at Tennis magazine, finds that a "new barbarism" has taken hold of the tour, reducing players from "gentlemen to jerks." Mr. Baltzell, an emeritus professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a well-known chronicler of the WASP aristocracy, longs for the dreamy days when players used wooden racquets, hit white balls and behaved like gentlemen. In his new work of "historical sociology," he sees the ruination of tennis as a portentous social metaphor. "As I write, in our increasingly classless and bureaucratic world, the gentleman's descendants in America and England have abdicated authority, not only over their wives and children but also over their nations and the world," he declares.

 

Mr. Bodo has obviously spent a good deal of time talking with Mr. Baltzell and calls him "the single most important influence on my interpretation of the game." But where the professor brims with intellectual confidence, the journalist is somewhat self-conscious about his pronouncements. "An opinion can be a terrible thing to have," Mr. Bodo writes at the end of his author's note. He spends the rest of the book testing this proposition, with a resulting mixture of genuine insight and inadvertent hilarity. As he writes of Mr. Baltzell: "The sociology of the professional game comes to life like a 3-D comic book when you look through his magic glasses."

 

When Mr. Bodo puts on the magic glasses of sociology himself, he tends to go completely over the top. "New York is full of flesh-eaters," he writes. "It's a thumbs-up, thumbs-down kind of town. Start spreading the news, but watch your back. The dude's got a Glock." Or: "Show me a true Parisian, and I'll show you a man whose veins are clogged with cholesterol sludge and whose heart harbors a secret passion for the accordion. I'll show you a woman who's got a little thing for Rodney Dangerfield. Don't ask why, c'est la vie." Mr. Bodo becomes even more expansive when he strays into psychology. He strolls telepathically through the mind of Gloria Connors as she watches her son Jimmy play: "Perhaps she was entranced by Jimbo's status as an Oedipal avenger come to life, a raging, mother-loving, foulmouthed son who unabashedly, even gleefully, fondled himself like an infant in front of his mother." Hunter S. Thompson never strung his racquet any tighter than Peter Bodo.

 

Mr. Bodo draws freely on the two decades he has spent covering tennis, and he is at his best when analyzing styles of play or relating an anecdote that never made it into the newspapers. He produces a haunting portrait of Bjorn Borg after conducting a routine interview at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in 1978. The blinds in the lavish suite were drawn tight; the coffee table was littered with half-eaten fruit and dirty dishes; Borg was wearing a track suit that looked slept in; his face was unwashed and his hair hung in oily strands. On impulse Mr. Bodo asked the champion what he thought of Howard Hughes. "I don't know him," Borg replied. "He has a lot of money, huh? Anyway, he seems like a nice guy."

 

Having watched thousands of matches, Mr. Bodo writes not just with an expert's eye but with a finely tuned ear, as in this observation on John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl: "If you closed your eyes during a match between McEnroe and Lendl, it was easy to tell which man occupied either side of the court. McEnroe's footfalls were as silent as those of a cat, while Lendl made an astonishing amount of noise -- as if he were moving furniture."

 

Sizing up Chris Evert's success, Mr. Bodo makes clear that her metronomic stroking and "Ice Maiden" demeanor were only partly responsible. A key ingredient was her unique sense of where she was and where she had to be: "She sure made the court look small." Steffi Graf's "big secret," Mr. Bodo writes, "was that she couldn't play tennis," at least not in the technical sense. But her superior athletic ability and raw power more than compensated for a bad hitch in her serving motion and a defensive underspin backhand -- until the arrival of Monica Seles, "who used two hands off both wings to hit remarkably flat, hard, accurate strokes." Rivals hoped that "as Seles matured she would develop wide hips, substantial thighs and enough height and bulk to cause her problems." Instead, she grew to a well-proportioned 5 foot 9 and reeled off seven victories in ten Grand Slams between 1990 and April 1993, when she was stabbed in the back by a deranged fan wielding a nine-inch-long boning knife. The psychological damage caused by the attack has kept her off the court -- and prevented her from becoming what many experts thought she would be, the greatest woman player ever.

 

MR. BODO loses his way when he writes about the lives of women players off the tennis court. He asserts that the "degeneration and corruption" of the women's tour "has been the most underreported story in tennis in our time," and he sets out to rectify this oversight with three chapters irritatingly titled "The Gals of Babylon." He writes: " 'Now' is a crisis point in women's pro tennis, and now is about stabbings, child abuse, teen-age drug abuse and a shocking rate of attrition." On no fewer than three occasions he says that many or most of the top women players are lesbians. His proofs are few and far between. Andrea Jaeger serves as a flimsy buttress for several of his sensational assertions: she was a teen-age wonder who flamed out early; she "took to carrying a switchblade" ("I didn't even mind," Mr. Bodo says. "Shoot, I was 18 once, too"); and she was supposedly encouraged by her fellow players to embark on a lesbian relationship. Mr. Bodo recounts the familiar story of Jennifer Capriati's sad decline and drug bust. And he does the standard recitation of Martina Navratilova's lesbian lovers. (News flash: Judy Nelson demanded visitation privileges with Navratilova's dogs after the two women split up.) Mr. Bodo's sense of outrage is unconvincing until he comes to the subject of "tennis dads." These sorry creatures, many of them failed athletes, strut in the reflected glory of their teen-age daughters and often sponge off them as well. They can be aggressively exploitative (Stefano Capriati), feckless (Peter Graf) or abusive and potentially dangerous (Jim Pierce).

 

MR. BODO and Mr. Baltzell agree that most of the problems in tennis today can be traced to the amount of money sloshing around the game. Winning a singles title at Wimbledon is worth more than $500,000 -- which, Mr. Bodo reports, is roughly what Pete Sampras was guaranteed for merely showing up at a tournament in oil-rich Qatar, where he promptly lost his first-round match to somebody named Kareem Alami. In financial terms, playing tennis is something players do to get endorsements. As Mr. Bodo points out, Andre Agassi was earning $1 million a month in endorsements before he ever won a Grand Slam event. Small wonder, then, that players sign "patch deals" that make them look, in Mr. Bodo's words, like "a stock car plastered with sponsor logos."

 

Whatever remained of the amateur ideal disappeared on Aug. 30, 1979, in a match at Flushing Meadow, a venue that could be mistaken, Mr. Bodo writes, "for a coal-fired hydroelectric facility somewhere in the Ukraine." The contest pitted John McEnroe, who at the age of 20 had not yet won a Grand Slam, against the 36-year-old Ilie Nastase. As his coach once said, "Ilie doesn't have a brain, he has a bird flying around inside his head," and on this night the bird was more agitated than usual. Egged on by 10,000 beery fans, the players screamed expletives at each other and at the umpire. Nastase was penalized a point, then a game, for protesting calls for minutes at a time; ordered to serve, he simply stood at the base line, prompting the umpire to disqualify him. Amid flying trash and catcalls, the tournament director, William F. Talbert, removed the umpire and ordered play to resume; McEnroe then defeated the distracted Nastase for the second time.

 

The lessons of "the Thursday night massacre" were not lost on McEnroe. "I'll be the first to admit that I did play the system," he told Mr. Bodo. "I manipulated it more than some people realized. . . . In most cases I was fully aware of what I was doing on the court during an outburst, and I knew how I was -- or wasn't -- going to have to pay a price for it." The ruling bodies in tennis ought to heed McEnroe's simple advice: "Really, tennis should be more like baseball. If you go too far, you should get thrown out. And if you really go nuts, you should get suspended."

 

Reading Mr. Baltzell's book is like eavesdropping on a couple of Old Grotonians as they polish off a bottle of port at their club. "But who, I should like to ask, is to say that class snobbery is any worse than classless snobbery?" he writes. "For snobs are often the product of leveling upward and confident ages, while reverse snobbery or slipshod snobbery (in dress, manners, grammar, professional pride and craftsmanship in general) are insidious social diseases of leveling downward and despairing ages such as our own." Mr. Baltzell is also a scholarly cat who keeps getting caught in family trees. For example, the lineage of Richard D. Sears, winner of the first American title in 1881, is traced all the way back to Richard (the Pilgrim) Sears, who settled on Cape Cod in 1637.

 

While Mr. Baltzell may be an unabashed snob, he is by no means a bigot. He comes down hard on well-born WASP's for their frequent anti-Semitism and racism, and correctly notes that these prejudices contributed to the decline of upper-class authority after World War II. He realizes that gentlemen are of all colors and creeds, as he demonstrates when writing about Arthur Ashe. "In the increasingly uncivil quarter-century between his victory at Forest Hills, in 1968, and his tragic death, in 1993," Mr. Baltzell says, "the moral life of Arthur Ashe has constantly renewed my faith in the staying power of the gentlemanly ideal."

 

Bill Tilden presents a quandary for Mr. Baltzell. On the one hand, he came from "pure English stock" (breeding is mentioned so often that "Sporting Gentlemen" sometimes reads like a program for the Westminster Kennel Club show); he was educated at good schools (Germantown Academy and Penn); he was a devotee of the arts, especially music; and, most important, he was "the last cricket-club-bred gentleman to win our National Tennis Championship" (a point made three times). On the other hand, Tilden engaged in "blatant showmanship, occasional outrageous tantrums, unreasonable arrogance, and quarrelsome and intimidating behavior towards linesmen and tennis officialdom in general"; he was also twice convicted and sent to prison for molesting young boys. So much for the good old days; as Mr. Baltzell concludes, "the gentleman and the genius were always at war" in the person of Big Bill Tilden.

 

TENNIS missed a great opportunity in 1933, Mr. Baltzell believes, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association was denied its petition to hold an open tournament at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia. "Like golf, tennis today might have still been a class game," he writes, "held in classy surroundings like the Merion or Germantown cricket clubs rather than in such tasteless surroundings as the Philadelphia Spectrum, the Cow Palace in San Francisco or vulgar Flushing Meadow." Mr. Baltzell insists, improbably, that it's not too late: "The American tennis establishment must concentrate on remaking tennis into an elite and quality game by increasing the quality of the audience by decreasing the stadium size and the money take."

 

A better bet to straighten out tennis, or at least its prima donnas, might be Steve Denton, a touring pro from Texas who, in Mr. Bodo's words, "took it upon himself to be a one-man jerk patrol." He grabbed one jerk by the throat after a match and threatened another with a licking if he came into the locker room (the player went to his hotel without showering or changing). The Association of Tennis Professionals gave Denton its Sportsmanship Award for 1982. In this day and age, that's a bigger victory than a Grand Slam.

 

We hate this about classic menswear - people ranting at Pitti Uomo 109 / 2026

Les enfants du paradis | Children of Paradise (1945) Trailer | Director: Marcel Carné

 

Children of Paradise (French: Les Enfants du Paradis, [lez‿ɑ̃fɑ̃ dy paʁadi]) is a two-part French romantic drama film by Marcel Carné, produced under war conditions in 1943, 1944, and early 1945. Set in the theatrical world of 1830s Paris, it tells the story of a courtesan and four men—a mime, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat—who love her in entirely different ways.

 

It has received universal critical acclaim. "I would give up all my films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis", said nouvelle vague director François Truffaut. In Truman Capote's The Duke in His Domain (1957), actor Marlon Brando called it "maybe the best movie ever made". Its original American trailer positioned it as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939), an opinion shared by critic David Shipman. A 1995 poll of 600 French critics and industry professionals voted it the best French film ever made.

 

Title

As noted by one critic, "in French, 'paradis' is also the colloquial name for the gallery or second balcony in a theatre, where common people sat and viewed a play, responding to it honestly and boisterously. The actors played to these gallery gods, hoping to win their favour, the actor himself thus being elevated to an Olympian status." The film contains many shots of the audience hanging over the edge of these balconies (which are similarly known as "the gods" in the British theatre), and screenwriter Jacques Prévert stated that the title "refers to the actors ... and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience."

 

Story

Précis

Children of Paradise is set in the theatrical world of Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), centered on the area around the Funambules theatre, situated on the Boulevard du Temple – pejoratively referred to as the "Boulevard du Crime". The story revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance (Arletty). Four men – the mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the thief Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) – are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story forward. Garance is briefly intrigued/involved with them all, but leaves them when they attempt to force her to love on their terms, rather than her own. The mime Baptiste is the one who suffers the most in pursuit of the unattainable Garance.

 

Sources

The four men courting Garance are all based on real French personalities of the 1820s and 1830s. Baptiste Deburau was a famous mime and Frédérick Lemaître was an acclaimed actor on the "Boulevard of Crime" depicted in the film. Pierre Lacenaire was an infamous French criminal, and the character of the Comte Édouard de Montray was inspired by the Duc de Morny.

 

The idea for making a movie based on these characters came from a chance meeting between Carné and Jean-Louis Barrault, in Nice, during which Barrault pitched the idea of making a movie based on Deburau and Lemaître. Carné, who at the time was hesitant about which movie to direct next, proposed this idea to his friend Jacques Prévert. Prévert was initially reluctant to write a movie about a mime, "Jacques hated pantomime" his brother once said,[10] but Barrault assured Prévert, that he and his teacher Étienne Decroux, who plays Baptiste's father in the film, would take responsibility for developing the mime sequences. According to Trauner, Prévert then saw an opportunity to include the character of Lacenaire, the "dandy du crime", who fascinated him. The Germans were then occupying the whole of France, and Prévert is rumoured to have said "They will not let me do a movie about Lacenaire, but I can put Lacenaire in a film about Deburau". The script incorporates quotations from Lacenaire's autobiography.

 

Plot summary

Children of Paradise is divided into two parts, Boulevard du Crime ("Boulevard of Crime") and L'Homme Blanc ("The Man in White"). The first begins around 1827, the second about seven years later. The action takes place mainly in the neighbourhood of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, nicknamed "Boulevard of Crime" because of all the melodramas and bloody scenarios offered to the largely plebeian public each evening. There are two principal theatres: the Théâtre des Funambules ("Theatre of Tightrope Walkers") specializes in pantomime, since the authorities do not allow it to use spoken dialogue, which is reserved for the "official" venue, the Grand Theatre.

 

Part I: Boulevard of Crime

A young actor and womaniser, Frédérick Lemaître, dreams of becoming a star. He meets and flirts with Garance, a beautiful woman who earns her living by modestly exhibiting her physical charms in a carnival show. Garance staves off Frédérick's advances and goes to visit one of her acquaintances, Pierre-François Lacenaire, a rebel in revolt against society. Lacenaire is a proud, dangerous individual who works as a scrivener to cover his organized criminal enterprises. Shortly thereafter, Garance is accused of stealing a man's gold watch while she is watching a pantomime featuring Baptiste Deburau and a barker (Baptiste's father) in front of the Funambules Theatre. Lacenaire is in fact the guilty party. Baptiste, dressed up as the stock character Pierrot, saves her from the police by silently acting out the theft, which he has just witnessed. He reveals a great talent, a veritable vocation for pantomime, but falls immediately and irremediably in love with Garance, saving a flower she thanked him with. In the background, there is a price list for various seats, including Paradise, which is visible over the mime's shoulder.

 

Baptiste's father is one of the stars at the Funambules. The daughter of the theatre director, Nathalie, who is a mime also, is deeply in love with Baptiste. Before the performance that evening, a used-clothes peddler named Jéricho reads in her palm that she will marry the man she loves, as he knew her father was worried about her mood affecting her performances. When a fight breaks out that evening between two rival clans of actors, Baptiste and Frédérick manage to calm the crowd down by improvising a mime act, thus saving the day's receipts. The most enthusiastic of the spectators are those seated in "paradise" (paradis), a term denoting in French theatrical language the top floor of the balcony, where the cheapest seats are located.

 

Later that night, Baptiste catches sight of Garance with Lacenaire and his accomplices in a seedy restaurant/dancehall, "Le Rouge Gorge" (a pun: this means "The Robin" or "The Red Breast", but literally translates as "The Red Throat", a reference to the previous owner's throat having been slit). When he invites Garance to dance, he is thrown out of the restaurant by Avril, one of Lacenaire's thugs. He turns the situation around and leaves with Garance, for whom he finds a room at the same boarding house where he and Frédérick live. After declaring his love, Baptiste flees Garance's room when she says she doesn't feel the same way, despite her clear invitation to stay. When Frédérick hears Garance singing in her room, which is next to his, he quickly joins her.

 

Baptiste becomes the star of the Funambules; fuelled by his passion, he writes several very popular pantomimes, performing with Garance and Frédérick, who are now lovers. Baptiste is tormented by their affair, while Nathalie, who is convinced that she and Baptiste are "made for each other", suffers from his lack of love for her.

 

Garance is visited in her dressing room by the Count Édouard de Montray, a wealthy and cynical dandy who offers her his fortune if she will agree to be his mistress. Garance is repelled by him and mockingly rejects his proposition. The Count nonetheless offers her his protection if the need were to arise. She is later unjustly suspected of complicity in an abortive robbery and murder attempt by Lacenaire and Avril. To avoid arrest she is forced to appeal to Count Édouard for protection. The first part of the film comes to an end with this development.

 

Part II: The Man in White

Several years later, Frédérick is the star of the Grand Theatre. A man about town and a spendthrift, he is burdened with debts – which don't prevent him from devastating the mediocre play in which he currently has the main role by exposing it to ridicule in rehearsal and then playing it for laughs, rather than straight melodrama, on opening night. Despite achieving a smashing success, the play's three fussy authors are outraged and challenge him to a duel. He accepts and when he returns to his dressing room, Frédérick is confronted by Lacenaire, who apparently intends to rob and kill him. However, the criminal is an amateur playwright and strikes up a friendship with the actor instead. He and Avril serve as Frédérick's seconds the next morning, when the actor arrives at the duel dead drunk.

 

Baptiste is enjoying even greater success as a mime at the Funambules. When Frédérick goes to a performance the day after surviving the duel, he is surprised to find himself in the same box as Garance. His old flame has returned to Paris after having travelled throughout the world with the Count de Montray, who has kept her these several years. She has been attending the Funambules every night incognito to watch Baptiste perform. She knows she has always been genuinely in love with him. Frédérick suddenly finds himself jealous for the first time in his life. While the feeling is highly unpleasant, he remarks that his jealousy will help him as an actor. He will finally be able to play the role of Othello, having now experienced the emotions which motivate the character. Garance asks Frédérick to tell Baptiste of her presence, but Nathalie, now Baptiste's wife, is first informed by the spiteful rag-man Jéricho. She sends their small son to Garance's box to mortify her with their family's happiness. By the time Frédérick alerts Baptiste and he rushes to find her, the box is empty.

 

When Garance returns to the Count's luxurious mansion, she finds Lacenaire waiting for her. Lacenaire satisfies himself that Garance has no love for him and, on his way out, encounters the Count, who is irritated to see such an individual in his home. Lacenaire reacts to the Count's challenge with threats, revealing the knife at his belt. Later, Garance declares to the Count that she will never love him since she is already in love with another man, but declares she will continue to try to please him, and offers to spread the word on the streets that she is "mad" about him, if he would like.

 

Frédérick has finally achieved his dream of playing the role of Othello. The Count, who insists on attending the performance with Garance, is convinced that the actor is the man she loves. At a break in the play, the Count coolly mocks Frédérick, trying to provoke him into a duel. Elsewhere Baptiste, who is also in the audience, encounters Garance at last. When Lacenaire takes Frédérick's side in the verbal jousting, the Count attempts to humiliate him as well. Lacenaire takes revenge by calling him a cuckold and, dramatically pulling back a curtain, reveals Garance in Baptiste's embrace on the balcony. The two lovers slip away to spend the night together in Garance's former room at the Great Post House.

 

The next morning, at a hammam, Lacenaire assassinates the Count. He then calmly sits to wait for the police and meet his "destiny", which is to die on the scaffold. At the rooming house, Nathalie walks in on Baptiste and Garance. Garance is in a hurry to exit in order to prevent the duel between Frédérick and the Count, who she is unaware has been murdered, but Nathalie blocks her way, insisting that leaving is easy, while to stay and share someone's everyday life, as she has for the past six years with Baptiste, is much more difficult. Garance responds that she has lived with Baptiste for six years as well, that she felt him every day and night even though she was with another. Nathalie dismisses Garance's experience as unimportant and moves past her to Baptiste, allowing Garance to leave. Nathalie pleads with Baptiste for reassurance as he attempts to follow Garance. Baptiste pushes past her and is soon lost in the frantic Carnival crowd amid a sea of bobbing masks and unheeding, white Pierrots. The film ends as a desperate Baptiste is swept away with the crowd and Garance leaves in her carriage, her face impassive.

'The Red Balloon' | Critics' Picks | The New York Times

 

The Red Balloon (French: Le ballon rouge) is a 1956 French fantasy comedy-drama featurette written, produced and directed by Albert Lamorisse. The 34-minute short, which follows the adventures of a young boy and a sentient, mute red balloon, was filmed in the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris.

 

Pascal Lamorisse, a young boy, discovers a large, helium-filled red balloon on his way to school one morning. As he plays with it, he realizes that the balloon has a mind of its own. The balloon begins to follow him wherever he goes, never straying far, and sometimes floating outside his apartment window as his mother will not allow it inside. As Pascal and the balloon wander through the streets of Paris, they draw attention and envy from other children. At one point, the balloon enters his classroom, causing an uproar among his classmates and alerting the principal, who locks Pascal in his office. Later, after being freed, Pascal and the balloon encounter a young girl with a blue balloon that also seems to have a mind of its own.

 

One Sunday, Pascal is told to leave the balloon at home while he and his mother attend church. However, the balloon follows them through an open window and into the church, where a scolding beadle leads them out of the building. As Pascal and the balloon continue to explore the neighborhood, a gang of older boys, envious of the balloon, steal it while Pascal is inside a bakery. He retrieves it, but the boys chase him through narrow alleys. They hold Pascal back as they fell the balloon with slingshots and stones before one boy finally destroys it by stomping on it.

 

All of the other balloons in Paris come to Pascal's aid, lifting him aloft for a cluster balloon ride over the city.

 

The film serves as a visual record of the Belleville and Ménilmontant areas of Paris, which had fallen into decay by the 1960s. This decline led the Parisian government to demolish much of the area as part of a slum-clearance effort. While some of the site was rebuilt with housing projects, the rest remained wasteland for 20 years. Many of the locations featured in the film no longer exist, including one of the bakeries, the school, the famous staircase located just beyond the equally famous café Au Repos de la Montagne, the steep steps of passage Julien Lacroix where Pascal finds the balloon and the empty lot where many of the battles take place. Today, the Parc de Belleville stands in that area. However, some locations remain intact, such as the apartment where Pascal lives with his mother at 15 Rue du Transvaal, the Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix de Ménilmontant and the Pyrénées-Ménilmontant bus stop at the intersection of Rue des Pyrénées and Rue de Ménilmontant.

 

 

Since its first release in 1956, the film has generally received overwhelmingly favorable reviews from critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times hailed the simple tale and praised director Lamorisse, writing: "Yet with the sensitive cooperation of his own beguiling son and with the gray-blue atmosphere of an old Paris quarter as the background for the shiny balloon, he has got here a tender, humorous drama of the ingenuousness of a child and, indeed, a poignant symbolization of dreams and the cruelty of those who puncture them."

 

When the film was re-released in the United States in late 2006 by Janus Films, Entertainment Weekly magazine film critic Owen Gleiberman praised its direction and simple story line that reminded him of his youth, and wrote: "More than any other children's film, The Red Balloon turns me into a kid again whenever I see it...[to] see The Red Balloon is to laugh, and cry, at the impossible joy of being a child again."

 

Film critic Brian Gibson wrote: "So far, this seems a post-Occupation France happy to forget the blood and death of Adolf Hitler's war a decade earlier. But soon people’s occasional, playful efforts to grab the floating, carefree balloon become grasping and destructive. In a gorgeous sequence, light streaming down alleys as children's shoes clack and clatter on the cobblestones, the balloon bouncing between the walls, Pascal is hunted down for his floating pet. Its ballooning sense of hope and freedom is deflated by a fierce, squabbling mass. Then, fortunately, it floats off, with the breeze of magic-realism, into a feeling of escape and peace, The Red Balloon taking hold of Pascal, lifting him out of this rigid, petty, earthbound life."

 

In a review in The Washington Post, critic Philip Kennicott had a cynical view: "[The film takes] place in a world of lies. Innocent lies? Not necessarily. The Red Balloon may be the most seamless fusion of capitalism and Christianity ever put on film. A young boy invests in a red balloon the love of which places him on the outside of society. The balloon is hunted down and killed on a barren hilltop—think Calvary—by a mob of cruel boys. The ending, a bizarre emotional sucker punch, is straight out of the New Testament. Thus is investment rewarded—with Christian transcendence or, at least, an old-fashioned Assumption. This might be sweet. Or it might be a very cynical reduction of the primary impulse to religious faith."

 

The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 95% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on twenty reviews. The critical consensus reads: "The Red Balloon invests the simplest of narratives with spectacular visual inventiveness, making for a singularly wondrous portrait of innocence."

AH! LES ENFANTS!

 

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