À seul
If Simone Signoret was ever more beautiful than she is in Casque d'Or (1952), then there's yet another movie that I've got to see. Criterion has just released this charmingly simple doomed love story, with Serge Reggiani and Claude Dauphin, directed by Jacques Becker. It would be a Renoir come to life (and I mean the painter, not the filmmaker) if it were in color... Have you ever had to switch terminals at Heathrow? Your answer, I predict, will be either "Why?" or "What a silly question." You wait in interminable queues to get on a bus, and then you are carted through something like the final set of Full Metal Jacket before they blew it up. A wasteland of bins and rusty doors. More corners than a maze. The ride goes on for weeks: are we in Swindon yet? But a glance at GetMapping's aerial atlas of London suggests that the two principal terminals (1/2 and 3) are no more distant than the length of five or six planes. I guess you have to take the long way round... The Neat Receipts thingy doesn't work quite as smoothly as I'd hoped it would, but it's an obvious must-have for business travelers.... Reading The Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin's 1989 study of the Allies' disastrous muddling in Middle Eastern affairs during and after World War I, when experts who hadn't a clue what they were doing imposed a lot of bogus boundaries on regions of the Ottoman Empire. Very upsetting reading, but essential, especially coupled with Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919. That's how I stumbled on the Fromkin, by the way; I needed a paperback copy of the Macmillan, and there was Fromkin bundled right alongside it.
