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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...

La Ronde

Director: Max Ophüls

Writer: Louis Ducreux

Cinematographer: Christian Matras

Starring: Anton Walbrook, Simone Simon, Simone Signoret

Studio/Run time: Films Sacha Gordine, 97 mins.

82/100

Le Plaisir

Director: Max Ophüls

Writer: Jacques Natanson

Cinematographer: Christian Matras

Starring: Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Simone Simon

Studio/Run time: Ccfc, 97 mins.

80/100

Earrings of Madame de.

Director: Max Ophüls

Writers: Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls, Annette Wademant

Cinematographer: Christian Matras

Starring: Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio De Sica

Studio/Run time: Franco London Films, 105 mins.

84/100

In almost any scene of any of the films made by director Max Ophüls, be it in Berlin (before the ascent of the Nazi party), Paris, Hollywood, and then back in Paris, lie the director’s primary concerns: Men and women, lust, love, theatrical artifice and the illusion of desire. Though a favorite of Stanley Kubrick and perhaps the only peer to Orson Welles with regards to innovative camera shots,...