That year, as was customary, the Croisette was lined with deck chairs that could be rented per hour for a few francs (an elderly madame came around occasionally and gave you a paper slip when you paid her). Sitting there, you had a magnificent sweeping view of the Old Port with its outdoor restaurants and yachts and in the distance appeared the occasional ship, perhaps heading to nearby Nice. Lining the Croisette, opposite the luxury hotels, were fashionable beach restaurants shaded by colorful awnings that served Gallic delicacies, a few kiosks that sold newspapers and magazines, including the New York Herald Tribune and other foreign press, a string of palm trees, and large panels attached to the lampposts each of which promoted some new film that was in preparation or was being screened at the festival.
The Croisette was the pulsating heart of the two-week film festival which had begun to first be held in 1938, winning out as a venue over the competing city of Biarritz in the French Basque region. The festival’s beginnings could not have been more dramatic. The previous year, at the international film festival held in Venice, founded in 1932 by Benito Mussolini, instead of the American film favored by the festival jury, due to pressures exerted by Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the Best Film award went to an Italian entry, Luciana Serra, Pilot, produced by Mussolini’s son, and the Best Foreign Film chosen was Olympia, a long documentary directed by the prodigious German filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, an innovative masterpiece chronicling the summer 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin, even though the Venice Festival’s rules did not permit documentaries to vie for the awards.
In protest, the French, American and British jury members walked out of the festival. The injury was added to the previous year’s insult when Mussolini meddled with the jury to ensure that the French contender, René Clair’s pacifist La Grande Illusion, toplining Jean Gabin, did not win the Best Film award.
The French authorities thereupon decided to create their own democratic film festival in Cannes. However, they could not have picked a less auspicious day for an event that was to have run 20 days. The date chosen was May 31, 1939. The festival was to have been a star-studded Allied answer to the Fascist one held simultaneously in Venice. Chosen as honorary president was Louis Lumière. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer chartered an ocean liner and loaded on it a bevy of some of its most famous stars, among them Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Norma Shearer, Paul Muni, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy and Charles Boyer.
On the night before the scheduled opening of the festival, in the Cannes Municipal Casino, a private screening of the opening film, William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Maureen O’Hara and Charles Laughton as Quasimodo was screened. The Casino, built in 1907, was accommodated with a thousand seats for the main competing section and another salle with 500 for projecting short films. Oher films, such as The Wizard of Oz, Only Angels Have Wings, Union Pacific and Four Feathers never unspooled.
The following day, September 1, 1939, the day the festival was set to have been inaugurated, the German army invaded Poland, marking the start of the Second World War. The festival authorities first postponed the opening of the event for ten days, but when France and England shortly thereafter declared war on Germany, the festival was cancelled sine die.
It was not to be until the war was over that in 1946 the Cannes film festival would resuscitate, with a time slot of September 20 to October 5. The opening reception was held in the gardens of the Grand Hotel and the film screenings were in the Municipal Casino, Curiously, the 18-person jury selected no fewer than twelve films of the 44 competing pictures for the Golden Palm “best film” awards. Among them were David Lean’s Brief Encounter. The Lost Weekend, and Roma, Open City. Ray Milland won the prize for best actor for The Lost Weekend.
After some initial hiccups – the fest was not held in 1948 and 1950, it evolved into a competing showplace not only for the world’s most prestigious films but also, starting in 1959, became the major market for buying and selling independent films from around the world. In 1949 the Palais des Festivals started to be built, a block away on the Croisette from the Carlton Hotel, and in 1951 the dates of the event were moved to May so as to avoid clashing with the Mostra held in Venice. The number of sidebar events steadily increased, with the addition of a sidebar sections such as the Critics’ Week, a Directors’ Fortnight.
By the time of my first visit to Cannes in 1972, the festival, its many sidebar events and the film market with screenings in a half dozen of Cannes’ commercial cinemas, had grown to gargantuan proportions, though it was to expand even more in the coming decades, building a huge new Palais des Festivals et des Congrès that opened in 1982 near the port and flooding the Croisette with tents that housed film companies, delegations. Among these would be one occupied by Variety. But that still lay in the distant future.
In May 1975 the main venue for official screenings, press conferences, and sidebar events was still the old Palais, garlanded with the flags of all competing countries.
The cluster of international thespians, vedettes, and filmmakers, ranged from Hollywood iconic celebrities to neophyte cineastes toting cans of 35 millimeter experimental films under their arms. A legion of independent wheeler-dealer cinema distributors from Argentina to Malta, looking to pick up the rights for films, descended on the Festival. Hotel space had to be booked almost a year ahead of time.