SOURCE: A review of Hollywood, Mecca of the Movies, in The French Review, Vol. 69, No. 6, May, 1996, pp. 1033-34.

In the following review, Lampert-Greaux finds Cendrars's journal of his trip to Hollywood still relevant sixty years later.

Hollywood has always held a fascination for the French, much to the dismay of French filmmakers who shake their berets at the supremacy of American movies in their cinemas. Blaise Cendrars's journal, Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, proves that as early as 1936 there was already a healthy appetite in France for news of the American movie capital.

A popular French poet, novelist, essayist, and sometime newspaper man, Cendrars spent two weeks in Hollywood in 1936, installed in the luxury of the Roosevelt Hotel. On assignment for the daily newspaper Paris-Soir, Cendrars filed lively dispatches describing the activity along the palm-lined boulevards, and at the gates to the great studios. While circling the lives...