The Marignan Theater
The Parisian exclusivity of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs takes place at the Marignan cinema, located on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the premiere takes place with great pomp during a gala evening on Friday, May 6, 1938. This evening is announced by all the newspapers, including for example Midi Paris which devotes an article to it the day before.
A Great Gala
It is the magazine Pour Vous that describes the evening in its pages, on May 11th: “It was a great gala. With the canopy, the Republican guards and the newsreels filming the entrance of the guests. One heard first, on the stage of the Marignan, the young religious Singers With the Wooden Cross, presented spiritually by their master, the abbot Munier. And then the little Princess of Walt Disney settled on the screen and conquered everyone! At the exit, everyone was in love with Snow White! One hundred Parisian personalities were talking to each other: “How charming! It is delicious! And this dwarf “Grumpy” who is the very replica of that other grumpy Disney Donald the duck. Noël-Noël dreamed of the wonders of this fairy paradise where the good Adémaï would have loved to wander.
Renée Saint-Cyr, much in demand by the radio reporter who was broadcasting the gala, seemed still immersed in the supernatural world where we had just spent an hour and a half. Robert Siodmak, still steeped in the vigorous realism of his last film, Mollenard, was taking a bath in innocence, and Lily Pons, who saw the American version of Snow White in Hollywood, had also come to admire the French film, synchronized in Walt Disney’s own studios.”
The Program
We can thus know that in addition to Roy Disney, and Paul Stuart Buchanan, sent by the studio, are present this evening the actors Noël-Noël (a little forgotten nowadays), the actress René Saint-Cyr, the director Robert Siodmak and the singer Lily Pons, who was making a career in the United States and had been approached to give her voice to Snow White in the French version presented that evening. In addition to the little singers on stage, the program tells us that the screening included before the feature film, Pathé-Journal newsreels, and a documentary on penguins entitled “Une histoire de manchots”.
The newsreels mentioned at the beginning of the article, broadcast from the following May 11, are of course also those of Pathé, which have been preserved and can be seen below.
Check out the full program here.
