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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...

Does "The Reader" trivialize the Holocaust? The upcoming Weinstein Co. movie, directed by Stephen Daldry, stars Kate Winslet as a Nazi concentration camp guard accused of incinerating 300 Jews, and is being pushed for Oscar consideration. But the images that will stick in some viewers' memories will be full-frontal sex scenes. After a recent screening for such intellectuals as John Guare, Frank McCourt and Bartle Bull, Daldry subjected himself to a Q&A, during which art critic Charlie Finch said,...