As a graduate student around 1970, Paul Thomas learned through the grapevine that filmmaker Alain Resnais was in New York, living out of suitcases from one hotel to the next, and that he was short of ready cash. Thomas procured enough of a fee to lure Resnais and his wife, Florence Malraux, up to Harvard to give a talk to students in the fledgling film studies program he was helping to establish and in which he was teaching. This article recollects the memorable encounter.

Rossellini's dramatic contrivances in Stromboli , especially the performance of Ingrid Bergman, contribute more authenticity to this picture of a fishing village than does Visconti's allegedly more documentary approach to the same subject.