In 1936, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry signed the screenplay for Raymond Bernard’s film, “Anne Marie”, with two film stars of the time, Annabella and Pierre-Richard Willm. The action takes place at the Bel-Air aerodrome, behind the current Exhibition Center, the Espace Carat (in the towns of L’Isle-d’Espagnac, Ruelle and Magnac-sur-Touvre). The weather station often welcomed him, in 1935-1936 during the creation of the “Air Bleu” commercial line, which passed through Le Bourget, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, and Bordeaux. At the time, the Paris-Bordeaux plane journey could not be done in one go, and a “relay point” was needed to refuel and check the mechanics.
Pamela de MONTLEAU
He also had his habits just opposite, at the “Bar de l’Aviation”, where the manager remembered, at the end of his life, having received Saint-Exupéry, “who had played card tricks on him and offered him a few books “. The writer-aviator returned there often in the years 1939-1940, and he left, in his war notebooks, a true chronology of his flights. We can find the scenario of “Anne Marie” in the volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade dedicated to Saint-Exupéry, says Pamela de Montleau, an archivist for a spirits group, who became passionate about this little-known story.
Pamela de MONTLEAU
All the documents discovered by Paméla de Montleau on Saint-Exupéry and the Bel-Air aerodrome have been entrusted to the Saint-Exupéry Foundation, which this year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the aviator’s disappearance at sea in July 1944. The film “Anne Marie” will be screened on May 28 at the CGR in Angoulême, whose director, Matthieu Poligaré, has also become inexhaustible on Saint Exupéry and the great days of aviation. He had the 1936 film remastered to be able to project it correctly, as only one 35 millimeter print remains. “Anne Marie” is not Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s only cinematic experience. He also participated in the adaptation of his novel “Night Flight” by Clarence Brown in 1933 with Clark Gable.
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