Simone Signoret

If springtime in Paris isn't going to work for you this year, rent a movie and pretend -- until you can book a flight and go. Here are my Top 10 picks for films that best show off the French capital. For scenes from these memorable films, go to latimes....

A Marx brothers retrospective, a Marilyn Monroe double bill and a screening of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" featuring the work of the late composer Robert Sherman and his brother Richard are among this week's highlights....

Nov. 14, 1960: The Mirror begins publishing Maurice Zolotow’s biography of Marilyn Monroe (and yes, Clark Gable, her co-star in “The Misfits� dies in a few days). On the jump, Simone Signoret says that if Monroe is in love with......

French director Jean-Pierre Melville is the great poet of crime cinema, and 1963's "Le Doulos" -- starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and set in Paris, the most criminally romantic city in the world -- is a tour de force. Playing for a week at the Nuart in...

Friday April 7, 2000      Regis Wargnier's Oscar-nominated "East-West," a superb follow-up to his 1993 Oscar-winning "Indochine," takes the most somber of predicaments, and makes it involving, romantic and ultimately intensely suspenseful.      In doing...

Friday July 7, 1995      When Lauro, a Mexican photojournalist in Gabriel Retes' warmhearted serious comedy "El Bulto," awakens from a 20-year coma, his family naturally considers it a miracle. Yet so different is the world to Lauro, a dedicated leftist,...

With the blockbusters "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago" and "Funny Girl," Omar Sharif became an international star. Sharif, an Egyptian-born actor of Lebanese descent, cut a romantic figure with his handsome looks, dark-eyed gaze and aura of...

Indifferently received when it debuted in France, never before theatrically released in the United States, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 "Army of Shadows" stands revealed as a classic film that a trick of fate has made as relevant now as when it was made....

Nov. 10, 1959: June Crosby stabs her husband, Bob, with a 10-inch letter opener during a fight. She tells Beverly Hills police that she grabbed the letter opener to fight him off after he pushed her down during a violent argument. Her husband says she...

Wow! Now there’s an ugly layout, even for 1960. Mash Notes and Comment (Press Release) "An actor, by name TV star Don Porter, decided he needed a publicist and dropped in to see me regarding same. " 'I need publicity,' said Don. 'What kind can you...

• Katy Perry has been tapped to host the 12th edition of the Teen Choice Awards airing on Fox on Aug. 9. Perry is a four-time also-ran with these kudos, which determine winners via an online vote. She lost the Myspacer race in 2008 and her three music...