Louis Malle

The one who wouldn't hold still

Malle is the New Wave's great refusenik — the contemporary of the Cahiers crowd who kept every trick they prized (natural light, location shooting, a camera let off its leash) and none of the doctrine. Where Godard built a theory and then made films to prove it, Malle built nothing you could name in a sentence, and that is precisely the trouble critics have always had with him. He was called "eclectic" and "difficult to pin down," and he earned both by refusing to repeat himself: an undersea documentary, a jazz-scored thriller, an incest comedy, a Vichy collaboration study, an American play filmed as a two-hour dinner. The absence of a signature is the signature. He trusted the subject over the style, which auteurism could never quite forgive.

Thumeries to Beverly Hills

Born October 30, 1932 in Thumeries to the wealthy Béghin sugar dynasty, part Jewish and raised Catholic, he trained first in political science at Sciences Po and then at the film school IDHEC. His way in was the sea: he co-directed The Silent World (1956) with Jacques Cousteau, and it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — a launch at twenty-four few directors ever match. His feature debut Elevator to the Gallows (1958) carried a Miles Davis score improvised to the image and made Jeanne Moreau a star; The Lovers (1958), also with Moreau, was obscene enough in one American theatre to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Then the restlessness set in for good. Murmur of the Heart (1971) treated mother-son incest as almost tender; Lacombe, Lucien (1974), written with Patrick Modiano, watched a French farm boy drift into the Gestapo without a flinch of judgment. He decamped to America — Pretty Baby (1978), Atlantic City (1980), the near-motionless My Dinner with Andre (1981) — then came home for the autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987), his boyhood memory of a hidden Jewish schoolmate handed to the Nazis. He died of lymphoma in Beverly Hills on November 23, 1995, aged 63.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Malle #32 among all directors, composite 17.04 across 16 films — respectable, and lower than his hardware suggests. He is one of only four directors to win the Golden Lion at Venice twice, for Atlantic City and Au revoir les enfants, and those two are exactly his top pair here: Atlantic City at #168 (2.92, our most-cited Malle film at nine appearances) and Au revoir les enfants at #250 (2.43). After them the curve drops fast — Lacombe, Lucien at #393, The Silent World at #400, then a long tail that includes My Dinner with Andre (#633) and the shocker Zazie in the Metro (1960) down at #1048. That shape is the eclecticism scored: no towering peak, because he never made the same great film twice, and the aggregate rewards concentration.

Where to start

Au revoir les enfants for the one that hurts, and Atlantic City for Burt Lancaster's aging small-timer — the two crowns. Then Elevator to the Gallows to hear Miles Davis paint a city at night, and My Dinner with Andre if you want proof that two men at a table can be cinema.