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The Belgian-born Georges Simenon (1903-1989) wrote over 200 novels (by Wikipedia's count) plus many shorter works. The New York Times estimates that number (including his memoirs and nonfiction works) as being between 400 and 500. Simenon's creation, Inspector Jules Maigret, who appeared in about 75 works, "ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective." (I'm not sure how Poirot feels about that.) Of course, such popularity could not be overlooked by the entertainment industry, and imdb.com has compiled a list of 132 movies and TV shows based on his oeuvre. And now the Anthology Archives, with Kathy Geritz and the Pacific Film Archive, is presenting 14 of these celluloid joys within the series appropriately entitled Cine-Simenon: George Simenon on Film, which runs until August 21st.

Before viewing the celluloid Simenon, I decided to nestle down with the textural Simenon, and within a week, I had plowed through five of his works,...

On its way to Italy the title of this little known 1952 film about an American reporter in Paris got changed from Assignment - Paris to Destination Budapest. Perhaps, in the midst of the cold war, Budapest was more alluring and dangerous than Paris, which certainly suits the typically dramatic artwork of the great Anselmo Ballester (1897-1974). What Leonard Maltin describes as a “fitfully entertaining drama of reporter Dana Andrews trying to link together threads of plot between Communist countries against the West” looks, in Ballester’s hands, like the most torrid of noirs. As in his great poster for Affair in Trinidad, Ballester renders his male lead in monochrome, all the better to highlight his leading lady, here resplendent in a tight yellow sweater and a shimmering green skirt (who ever painted the folds of women’s clothes more transcendently than Ballester?).

The Ballester website maintained by his grandson Claudio...