An appraisal from a great author

From 'Still Life With Woodpecker':

In the nineteen-forties in Nazi-occupied Paris, an artist named Marcel Carné made a movie. He filmed it on location on the Street of Thieves, the old Parisian theater street where at one time there was everything from Shakespearean companies to flea circuses, from grand opera to girlie shows. Carné's film was a period piece and required hundreds of extras in nineteenth-century costume. It required horses and jugglers and acrobats. The movie turned out to be over three hours long. And Carné made it right under the Nazis' noses. The film is a three hour affirmation of life and an examination of the strange and sometimes devastating magnetism of love. Romantic? Oh, babe, it's romantic enough to make a travel poster sigh and a sonnet blush. But completely uncompromising. It's a celebration of the human spirit in all of its goofy, gentle, an grotesque guises. And he made it in the very midst of the Nazi occupation, filmed this beauty inside the belly of the beast. He called it Les Enfants du Paradis—Children of Paradise—and forty years later it's still moving audiences around the world. Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance. Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters may have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.
—Tom Robbins