The career of Jean Delannoy, a French director of lavish mid-20th-century film dramas suffered after he was publicly reviled by proponents of the New Wave as the ultimate anti-auteur.
Mr. Delannoy (pronounced duh-lah-NWAH) won a Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for his 1946 movie “La Symphonie Pastorale,” based on André Gide’s novel about a minister who falls in love with a young blind woman he has brought up.
He later took home awards from the Venice and Berlin film festivals for the 1950 film “Dieu A Besoin des Hommes” (“God Needs Men”), a drama about a remote community in need of a priest and the layman who assumes that role.
Mr. Delannoy also directed a string of highly regarded box-office hits as well as some undistinguished films, like “Notre Dame de Paris,” starring Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida and based on the Victor Hugo novel; it was released in the United States in 1957 as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Mr. Delannoy had worked in the film industry for two decades when, in 1954, François Truffaut, then a 21-year-old critic for the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote his controversial article “A Certain Trend in French Film.”
In the article Truffaut attacked France’s commercial cinema and its so-called tradition of quality, as exemplified by Mr. Delannoy and certain colleagues, and advocated in its place auteurism, a new, director-centered filmmaking style, which Truffaut came to embrace as a filmmaker. Established French directors, Truffaut wrote, had failed to express their personalities or espouse a worldview. He said that the worst of Jean Renoir’s movies would always be more interesting than the best of Mr. Delannoy’s.
Stung, Mr. Delannoy responded by letter, calling the criticism “so low that I have never encountered anything like it in my 20 years in the profession.” He believed that a director’s job was to realize the work of the scriptwriters; Truffaut considered that attitude contemptuous of film as an art form.
Jean-Luc Godard shared Truffaut’s opinion, once suggesting that when Mr. Delannoy carried a briefcase to the studio, he might as well be going to an insurance office.
As if to prove them right, Mr. Delannoy soon directed a rash of inferior movies.
He had earlier had his own complaints about the industry, partly because of censorship. “L’Éternel Retour” (“The Eternal Return”), a retelling of the Tristan and Isolde story, was condemned by the Legion of Decency in 1948. “Le Garçon Sauvage” (“The Wild Boy,” released in the United States in 1952 as “Savage Triangle”), the story of a Marseille prostitute and her son, also ran afoul of censors.
Mr. Delannoy responded by writing an article for The New York Times. The film industry, he wrote, was “dying of infantilism.”
“By its methods censorship believes it has protected youth’s soul,” he wrote, “whereas it has, at one and the same time, done it violence and dulled it.”
Mr. Delannoy devoted much of his career to religious films, including “La Symphonie Pastorale” and “Dieu A Besoin des Hommes,” which Bosley Crowther, writing in The Times in 1951, called a “film of rare and simple beauty” that “goes boldly and squarely to the heart of the fundamental nature of religion in the best tradition of French intellect and art.”
While in his 80s Mr. Delannoy made “Bernadette” (1988), about the 19th-century saint, and a sequel, “La Passion de Bernadette” (1989). His last film was “Marie de Nazareth,” released in 1995, when he was 87.
Other notable films included “Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire” (1942), released during the Nazi occupation and considered a direct call to the Resistance; “Les Jeux Sont Faits” (“The Chips Are Down”) (1947), a romantic fantasy about the afterlife; “Maigret Tend un Piège” (“Maigret Sets a Trap”) (1958), starring Jean Gabin as Georges Simenon’s police hero; and a historical drama, “La Princesse de Clèves” (1961).
Mr. Delannoy was made an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Commander of Arts and Letters and a Commander of the National Order of Merit. He received an honorary César, the French equivalent of the Oscar, in 1986.
President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Mr. Delannoy on Thursday, saying he was “a huge director” who “contributed to our country’s cultural influence.”
Jean Delannoy was born on Jan. 12, 1908, in Noisy-le-Sec, a Paris suburb. After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, he tried out several occupations, among them journalist, decorator and door-to-door salesman for a bank.
He tried acting, appearing in small roles in “La Grande Passion” (1928), a silent film, and René Barberis’s “Casanova” (1934). But his real film career began when he found work as an editor at the Paramount Studios complex near Paris. The first movie he edited was “Le Roi des Champs-Élysées” (“King of the Champs-Elysees”), a 1934 Buster Keaton comedy made in France.
Mr. Delannoy made his directing debut the same year with “Paris-Deauville,” a musical-comedy. And although the auteurists complained that he did nothing more than translate the work of others for the screen, Mr. Delannoy actually wrote more than two-dozen screenplays, beginning with “Le Diamant Noir” (“The Black Diamond”) in 1941.
Mr. Delannoy married Juliette Geneste in 1938, and they had a daughter, Claire. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Even before the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, took aim at him, Mr. Delannoy stood up for his filmmaking philosophy, which celebrated directorial distance. “The only way to do a good movie today is by taking a good subject,” he said in a 1951 interview with The Times. “It forces you to go beyond yourself.” Da The New York Times, 20 Luglio 2008
