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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...

(Maurice Pialat, 1991; Eureka!, 15)

One of the most prickly mavericks of French cinema, Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was a painter, documentary film-maker and occasional actor before making his feature debut in his mid-40s with L'enfance nue, an intense realistic film about a disturbed child being passed from family to family.

In 1987 Pialat famously waved his fist at a hostile Cannes audience when receiving the Palme d'Or for Under Satan's Sun (a complex Catholic movie from a novel by Georges Bernanos starring Gérard Depardieu in one of his several Pialat films). Norman Mailer was a member of the jury. Four years later Pialat flourished his fist again at the bourgeoisie in this lengthy, characteristically unromantic and unsentimental contribution to the centenary anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. It's a far cry in tone from the Vincente Minnelli-directed biopic Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas, released in France as La Vie...