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Louis Malle

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Louis Malle (October 30 1932 – November 23 1995) was an Academy Award nominated French film director, working in both French and English.

Early Days in France

Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries, Nord, France. He initially studied political science at the Sorbonne before turning to film studies instead.

Poster for "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud" (or "Elevator to the Gallows," Eng. trans)

He worked as the co-director and cameraman to Jacques Cousteau on the Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning (at the 1956 Academy Awards and Cannes Film Festival respectively) documentary Le Monde du silence/The Silent World (1956) and assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped (French title: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, 1956) before making his first feature, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (originally released in the U.S. as Frantic, later as Elevator to the Gallows) in 1957. A taut thriller featuring an original score by Miles Davis, the film made an international film star of Jeanne Moreau, at the time a leading stage actress of the state Comédie-Française. Malle was 24 years old.

File:Amants02.jpg
A Scene from "Les Amants"

Malle's Les Amants ("The Lovers," 1958), which like Ascenseur pour l'échafaud starred Moreau, caused major controversy due to its sexual content leading to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case regarding the legal definition of obscenity. In Jacobellis v. Ohio, a theater owner was fined $2500 for obscenity. It was eventually reversed by the higher court that found that the film was not obscene and hence constitutionally protected. However, the court could not agree on the definition of "obscene," which caused Justice Potter Stewart to utter his "I know it when I see it" opinion, perhaps the most famous single line associated with the court.

Malle is sometimes incorrectly associated with the nouvelle vague - his work doesn't fit in or correspond to the auteurist theories that apply to the work of Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, and others, and he had nothing whatsoever to do with Cahiers du cinema. Nonetheless, his film Zazie dans le métro ("Zazie in the Metro," 1960, an adaptation of the Raymond Queneau novel) did inspire Truffaut to write an enthusiastic letter to Malle.

Other films also tackled taboo subjects: Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within, 1963) centres on a man about to commit suicide, Le souffle au cœur/Murmur of the Heart (1971) deals with an incestuous relationship between mother and son and Lacombe Lucien (1974) is about collaboration with the Nazis in Vichy France in World War II. The second film earned Malle his first (of three) Academy Award nominations for "Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced."

Move to America, Work in English

File:Dinnerwithandre.jpg
My Dinner With Andre DVD cover

Malle later moved to the United States and continued to direct there. His later films include Pretty Baby (1978), Atlantic City (1981), My Dinner with Andre (1981), Damage (1992) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya) in English; Au revoir, les enfants ("Goodbye, Children," 1987) and Milou en Mai (May Fools in the U.S., 1990) in French. Ironically, the sole Academy Award nomination Malle would received for directing would be for the English language Atlantic City while none of his French language efforts would garner nominations for "Best Foreign Language Film" (Au revoir, les enfants and Murmur of the Heart were nominated in writing categories). It is interesting to note that just as his earlier films such as Frantic and The Lovers helped popularize French films in the United States, My Dinner with Andre was at the forefront of the rise of American independent cinema in the 1980s.

Malle was married to Anne-Marie Deschodt from 1965 – 1967. He had a son, Manuel Cuotemoc (born 1971), with former girlfriend and German actress Gila von Weitershausen, and a daughter Justine (born 1974) with Canadian-born French actress Alexandra Stewart.

He married the actress Candice Bergen in 1981. They had a daughter, Chloë Malle, in 1985. He died at their home in Beverly Hills, California of lymphoma, aged 63.

Bibliography

A number of books have been written on Malle and his work. The interview collection Malle on Malle was published by Faber in 1992 and revised, after the director's death, in 1996. The definitive biography of the director is only available in French, Pierre Billard's "Louis Malle - Rebelle solitaire" (2003). The study, "Louis Malle", written by Hugo Frey, was published by Manchester University Press in 2004. The Films of Louis Malle: A Critical Analysis, a detailed critical exploration of Malle's films, written by Nathan Southern and Jacques Weissgerber, was published by McFarland in 2005.

Filmography

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