Charles Boyer.

"The Film Society of Lincoln Center will begin a changing of the guard this weekend as its 11-day, two-sided program extolling Saints, Sinners, Obsession, and Seduction transitions from American leading lady Jennifer Jones to vintage French screen heartthrob Charles Boyer," writes Bruce Bennett. "Though only 35 when he appeared in Le Bonheur, Boyer had already perfected the fatalistic, world-weary Gallic equipoise that became his oft-caricatured stock-in-trade on both sides of the Atlantic."

Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "History Is Made at Night is my first encounter with [Frank] Borzage; my response, generally, is that it's easy enough to see why he has ardent admirers, but also why he'll never have more than a relative handful of those."

Updated through 5/27.

Charles Boyer and the Art of Seduction runs through Tuesday.

Update: "The First Legion is the high point of the driest period of Douglas Sirk's career, the stretch between his adventurous independent American films of the 40s and the full-bodied Universal melodramas upon which his reputation stands today," writes Dan Sallitt.

Update, 5/27: "No one in a Hollywood movie has cried in such agony as Charles Boyer does at the end of Frank Borzage's History is Made at Night (1937)," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Not until Tippi Hedren in The Birds, or perhaps Jimmy Stewart in some of his traumatic films with Anthony Mann do we find someone in Hollywood expressing so much pain. But that kind of agony is of a personal, inward driven pain - and perhaps something let loose after the Second World War - whereas Boyer in Borzage utters a cry of selfless pain.... Borzage, rightly, is the greatest romantic of the cinema."

Posted by dwhudson at May 24, 2008 11:39 AM