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Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

According to the notes on the back of this typically exemplary Eureka!/Masters of Cinema release, this 1934 film by Jacques Feyder, who from all appearances seems to be one of the handful of directors who did not miss a step when making the transition from silent to sound filmmaking (this was in fact the director's first "talkie," so to speak), is "an early benchmark of poetic realism." That's the sort of statement that these days is apt to get some cinephiles in a bit of a lather as to what "realism" in films is and whether "realism" or "reality" ever ought to be discussed with respect to the film image at all, and so on, but what the heck, it's just jacket copy, right? In any event, my own favorite moment of "realism" in the film occurs during one of a series of establishing shots that tell us we're in North Africa,...

This classic French battle between love, fate and bewitching passion set a pattern for later hits such as Casablanca

This classic example of pre-war French "poetic realism", directed by the great Belgian movie-maker Jacques Feyder, centres on an upper-class playboy business man (Pierre Richard-Willm) with financial problems being compelled to leave Paris and his high-maintenance lover Florence, and join the Foreign Legion in Morocco. A couple of years later as a reckless, hard-drinking sergeant, he meets a beautiful prostitute, the amnesiac Irma who's Florence's double, though their hair colour and voices are different. Can they be the same woman? A story of love, death and fate, this truly adult movie has a great cast that includes Marie Bell as both Florence and Irma, Charles Vanel as a vile hotelier and Françoise Rosay as a compassionate barmaid who predicts the hero's troubled future. Lazare Meerson's sets range from art deco Paris to Moroccan nightclubs,...