Louis Malle

A sugar fortune in the north

Louis Malle was born on 30 October 1932 at Thumeries, a village in the Nord department, into one of the wealthiest industrial families in France. His mother was a Béghin, of the sugar-refining dynasty, and the family money was substantial enough that Malle never had to take work he did not want.

He was sent to a Catholic boarding school and grew up in a conservative, devout household. The independence the money bought him mattered to his career: he financed several of his own films and could afford to fail commercially, which he did more than once and without much apparent worry.

He studied political science briefly, then enrolled at the IDHEC film school in Paris in the early 1950s against his family's wishes.

Cousteau and Bresson

Malle left film school early to join Jacques-Yves Cousteau on the research ship Calypso as a cameraman. The result was The Silent World, an underwater colour documentary that he co-directed with Cousteau and that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1956 and the Academy Award for best documentary the following year. Malle was twenty-three.

He then worked as an assistant to Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped, the story of a French Resistance prisoner breaking out of a Gestapo jail in Lyon. Bresson's method — non-professional actors, no performance, extreme economy — was the opposite of Cousteau's, and Malle had now trained under both.

Lift to the Scaffold and The Lovers

Malle's first feature, Lift to the Scaffold, came out in 1958. A man murders his lover's husband and is trapped in the building's lift while his car is stolen by two teenagers who then commit a murder of their own. It won the Prix Louis-Delluc.

The film is remembered for two things beyond the plot. Jeanne Moreau walks the Champs-Élysées at night looking for a man who never arrives, filmed with available light in a way that was then unusual. And Miles Davis, in Paris on tour, improvised the score in a single night session with a French rhythm section while the film ran on a screen in front of him.

The Lovers followed later the same year, again with Moreau, as a provincial wife who leaves her husband and child after one night with a stranger. It won a prize at Venice, and in the United States a cinema manager in Ohio was convicted of obscenity for showing it. The conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964 in a judgment that has been quoted ever since, in which a justice declined to define hard-core pornography and said he knew it when he saw it.

The 1960s

Malle refused to repeat himself, and the films of the 1960s have almost nothing in common with one another. Zazie dans le métro, in 1960, is a fast, cartoonish adaptation of a Raymond Queneau novel about a foul-mouthed child loose in Paris. The Fire Within, in 1963, is a quiet, grey account of the last two days before a man kills himself. Viva Maria!, in 1965, is a comic western with Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot as revolutionaries in Central America.

In 1968 he went to India and stayed for several months with a small crew, shooting without a script. The result was a seven-part television series, Phantom India, and a feature, Calcutta. The Indian government objected strongly to what the films showed and banned the BBC from the country for a period after they were broadcast.

The films that caused arguments

Murmur of the Heart, in 1971, follows a fourteen-year-old boy in Dijon in 1954 and ends with a night he spends with his mother. Malle wrote it as a comedy and refused to treat the ending as a tragedy, and the film was attacked and defended in roughly equal measure. It was nominated for an Academy Award for its screenplay.

Lacombe, Lucien, in 1974, provoked a still angrier argument. A farm boy in south-west France in 1944 tries to join the Resistance, is turned away, and joins the French Gestapo instead, more or less by accident. Malle gave him no political convictions at all and no moment of realisation. French critics on the left accused him of excusing collaboration; others argued that showing collaboration as ordinary and unthinking was the harder and truer thing. The argument was fierce enough that Malle left the country.

America

Malle moved to the United States in 1976 and worked there for a decade. Pretty Baby, in 1978, is set in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 and stars Brooke Shields, then twelve, as the daughter of a prostitute; it was censored in several countries and banned outright in others.

Atlantic City, in 1980, is a small film about an ageing minor gangster and a casino waitress in a city being demolished and rebuilt around them. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. My Dinner with Andre, in 1981, is two men talking over a meal for two hours, and it became an unlikely commercial success. Alamo Bay, in 1985, is about Vietnamese refugee fishermen and the Texans who attacked them.

In 1980 he married the American actress Candice Bergen. They remained married until his death.

Au revoir les enfants

Malle returned to France and in 1987 made the film he had been circling for forty years. Au revoir les enfants is set in a Catholic boarding school in the winter of 1944, where the priests are hiding three Jewish boys among the pupils under false names. A boy befriends one of them. The Gestapo come, and the boys and the headmaster are taken away.

The story is his own. Malle had been at such a school, at Avon near Fontainebleau, and had watched the arrest.[2] He said he had tried to write the film several times and had not been able to until he was in his fifties.

It won the Golden Lion at Venice, seven Césars including best film and best director, and Academy Award nominations for best foreign-language film and best original screenplay.

Last films and death

Milou en mai, in 1990, is a comedy about a family gathering at a country house while the events of May 1968 happen elsewhere. Damage, in 1992, is about a British politician destroying himself over his son's girlfriend. Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994, films a rehearsal of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a derelict Broadway theatre, and was his last completed work.

Louis Malle died of lymphoma at his home in Beverly Hills on 23 November 1995, aged sixty-three.[3]

Why Louis Malle matters

Malle has no signature, and that has cost him. Directors are remembered for a style, and his films look nothing like each other: an underwater documentary, a jazz thriller, a children's farce, a suicide, a western, an Indian travelogue, an American gangster picture, a filmed rehearsal.

What runs through them is subject matter. He went at things French cinema of his generation would not touch, and he refused to supply the moral framing that would have made them safe. Lacombe, Lucien does not explain why its collaborator collaborates. Murmur of the Heart does not treat incest as a catastrophe. Au revoir les enfants does not give the betrayal a villain. In each case Malle put the facts on screen and left the judgment to the audience, which is why the arguments about the films outlasted their releases.

Not one of the Cahiers group

Malle belonged to the same late-1950s Paris as the New Wave and shared its freedom and its streets, but he was never part of the Cahiers du cinéma programme that François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard came out of. His first fiction feature, Lift to the Scaffold, reached the screen in 1958, a year before their debuts.

His third feature, Lacombe, Lucien, brought his first Academy Award nomination, for best foreign-language film, in 1975.