‘No international incidents’: the 10th Cannes film festival – archive, 1957

4 May 1957: Bernard Levin plays spot the celebrity in Cannes at the opening performance of Around the World in 80 Days “Zut,” said a starlet – an English starlet – as I trod on her dress, and I stifled my surprise with the reflection that this was, after all, the first night of the 10th Cannes film festival. The film chosen for the opening performance was Mr Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days – of which more in a moment – and the world of the cinema, not to mention of the Côte d’Azur, had turned up in force to pause on the steps for the photographers, to spot each other in the crowd, and to ignore the microphone’s increasingly desperate appeals for the audience to be seated. But the game of spot the celebrity (“trouve-vedette,” it is called here) is one that we can all play and who could miss Madame Suzy Volterra (even without a hat) or M Jules Dassin or Miss Dorothy Dandridge or, above all, the guests of honour Mr Todd and Miss Elizabeth Taylor? Not forgetting of course, M Cocteau, without whose white croft of hair, and now mellowed expression the festival would hardly, it is said, be worth holding at all. Nothing by halves Well, if we missed the celebr