America’s greatest film maker.

If you don’t already know that Woody Allen is America’s greatest film maker, then it’s high time you took your Spielberg schmaltz-blinkered saccharine brain and aired it out a bit. Allen seems to have moved much of his film making to Europe in recent years (hardly surprising after all those years in a nation which denigrates intellect as ‘elitism’ and puts down our best and brightest as ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’) with such movies as Everyone Says I Love You, the finest musical (with ‘Chicago’) of recent years, Match Point, (a fine society murder-thriller), Vicki, Christina, Barcelona (the story of a muse, an electric Penélope Cruz) and, most recently, Midnight in Paris, a charming piece of nostalgia and whimsy rivaled only by his own Manhattan.

Allen has long commanded access to the very best actors – who wouldn’t want to act for the American master? – and the cast of Midnight in Paris is as good as it gets. His recreation of Gertrude Stein‘s salon of writers and painters of the 1920s is perfection itself. There is no better way of illustrating this by comparing the photographs of a leading American member of that group, the surrealist photographer Man Ray, with Allen’s realizations in the movie. Man Ray and the great Lee Miller were lovers at the time.

Hemingway by Man Ray and by Woody Allen

Dali by Man Ray and by Woody Allen.

The actors in the Allen movie, shown above, are Corey Stoll and Adrien Brody, respectively.

You don’t have to love Paris to love the movie, but if you are a Francophobe it beats me why you are reading my blog.

It’s not enough to be an original thinker with a fertile mind. Those alone are not prescriptions for success. A solid work ethic is the glue that binds, and you can read all about Allen’s here.

For Allen’s take on Manhattan’s architecture, click here.