French postcard in the Collection Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6011, 1988. Photo: Sam Levin. Jean Renoir at the set of La bête humaine/The Human Beast (1938).
Jean Renoir (1894-1979) was one of the major French film directors before WW II. His films La Grande Illusion/The Great Illusion (1937) and La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939) belong to the masterpieces of the French cinema. During the German invasion of France in 1941, he moved to Hollywood where he directed This Land Is Mine (1943), and The Southerner (1945). He later became an American citizen.
Jean Renoir was born in 1894 in Paris, France. He was the son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. He fought in the French army during World War I and was wounded in battle. His wounds never healed properly and he suffered from it for the rest of his life. He recuperated by watching films with his leg elevated. Later, he was honoured with the Croix de Guerre. After the end of World War I, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married his father's last model, Catherine Hessling. Renoir wanted to make a star of her and directed her in Catherine ou Une vie sans Joie/Backbiters (1924). His second feature was the Emile Zola adaptation Nana (1926) starring Hessling, Werner Krauss, and Jean Angelo. The film's extravagances include two magnificent set pieces – a horse race and an open air ball. The film never made a profit, and the commercial failure of the film robbed Renoir of the opportunity to make such an ambitious film again for several years. Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance his films. Renoir and Hessling separated in 1930, although he remained married to her until 1943. His next partner was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name.
In 1931 Jean Renoir directed his first sound films, the comedy On purge bébé/Baby's Laxative (1931), based upon the play by Georges Feydeau, and La Chienne/The Bitch (1931). with Michel Simon. The following year he made Boudu sauvé des eaux/Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), a farcical sendup of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family, who meet with comic, and ultimately disastrous, results when they attempt to reform a vagrant played by Michel Simon. He then directed La Nuit du carrefour/Night at the Crossroads (1932), based on a novel by Georges Simenon and starring Renoir's brother Pierre Renoir as Simenon's popular detective, Inspector Maigret. Partie de campagne/A Day in the Country (1936) was based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, who was a friend of Renoir's father. It chronicles a love affair over a single summer afternoon in 1860 along the banks of the Seine. Renoir never finished filming due to weather problems, but producer Pierre Braunberger turned the material into a release in 1946, ten years after it was shot. By the middle of the 1930s, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front. Several of his films, such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange/The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935) with René Lefèvre, La vie est à nous/Life Belongs to Us (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938), reflect the movement's politics. Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin starred in one of his better-known films, the war film La Grande Illusion/The Great Illusion (1937). A film on the theme of brotherhood, relating a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I. It won the Best Artistic Ensemble award at the Venice Film Festival and was the first foreign-language film to receive a nomination for the Oscar for Best Picture. He followed it with another success, La Bête Humaine/The Human Beast (1938), a Film Noir based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Simone Simon and Jean Gabin. With an ensemble cast, Renoir made La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939), a satire on contemporary French society. Renoir played the character Octave, who serves to connect characters from different social strata. The film was his greatest commercial failure. A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned by the government. Renoir was a known pacifist and supporter of the French Communist Party, which made him suspect in the tense weeks before the war began. In July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and his future second wife Dido Freire to work on the script for a film version of Tosca. He abandoned the project to return to France and make himself available for military service.
Jean Renoir and Dido Freire left France in 1941 during the German invasion and moved to Hollywood. Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him. His first American film, Swamp Water (1941), was a drama starring Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan. He co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine (1943), starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton. The Southerner (1945) is a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best American film. He was nominated for an Oscar for Directing for this work. Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, 'Le Journal d'une femme de chambre', starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith. His The Woman on the Beach (1947), starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California. Both films were poorly received and they were the last films Renoir made in America. At this time, Renoir became a naturalised US citizen. In 1949 Renoir traveled to India to shoot The River (1951), his first colour film. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India. The film won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.
After returning to work in Europe, Jean Renoir made a trilogy of colour musical comedies on the subjects of theatre, politics, and commerce: Le Carrosse d'or/The Golden Coach (1953) with Anna Magnani, French Cancan (1954) with Jean Gabin and María Félix, and Eléna et les hommes/Elena and Her Men (1956) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais. During the same period, Renoir produced Clifford Odets' play 'The Big Knife' in Paris. He also wrote his own play, 'Orvet', and produced it in Paris featuring Leslie Caron. Renoir made his next films with techniques adapted from live television. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe/Picnic on the Grass (1959), starring Paul Meurisse and Catherine Rouvel, was filmed on the grounds of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Le Testament du docteur Cordelier/The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs. Renoir's penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé/The Elusive Corporal (1962), with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur, is set among French POWs during their internment in labour camps by the Nazis during World War II. The film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other.
Renoir's loving memoir of his father, 'Renoir, My Father' (1962) describes the profound influence his father had on him and his work. As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays for income. He published a novel, 'The Notebooks of Captain Georges', in 1966. Captain Georges is the nostalgic account of a wealthy young man's sentimental education and love for a peasant girl. Renoir's last film is Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir/The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir (1969). The film is a series of three short films made in a variety of styles. It is, in many ways, one of his most challenging, avant-garde, and unconventional works. Unable to obtain financing for his films and suffering declining health, Renoir spent his last years receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills and writing novels and his memoirs. Renoir's memoir, 'My Life and My Film's, was published in 1974. In 1975, he received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, and the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the Légion d'honneur. Jean Renoir passed away in 1979 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, of a heart attack. Although he was an American citizen, he was buried in France following a state funeral. From 1957 till his death in 1979, he was married to Dido Freire. His son Alain Renoir (1921-2008) became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of medieval English literature.
Sources: Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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French postcard in the Collection Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6492, 1996. Photo: Collection Dominque Lebrun D.R. Cary Grant in North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).
Handsome, suave English-American actor Cary Grant (1904-1986) became one of Hollywood's definitive classic leading men, known for his debonair demeanour. Grant’s best-known films include Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959), and Charade (1963).
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alexander Leach in Horfield, Bristol, England, in 1904. His parents were Elsie Maria (Kingdon) and Elias James Leach, who worked in a factory. Grant considered himself to have been partly Jewish. He had an unhappy upbringing in Bristol. At age nine, he came home from school one day and was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort. The real truth, however, was that she had been placed in a mental institution, where she would remain for years, and he was never told about it. Grant did not learn that his mother was still alive until he was 31, when his father confessed to the lie, shortly before his own death. At age 14, Archibald dropped out of school. He lied about his age and forged his father's signature on a letter to join Bob Pender's troupe of knockabout comedians. He learned pantomime as well as acrobatics as he toured with the Pender troupe in the English provinces. Then in 1920, he was one of the eight Pender boys selected to go to the US. Their show on Broadway, Good Times, ran for 456 performances at the New York Hippodrome (the largest theatre in the world at the time with a capacity of 5,697), giving Grant time to acclimatise. He would stay in America. Grant spent the next couple of years touring the United States with The Walking Stanleys. He visited Los Angeles for the first time in 1924, which left a lasting impression upon him. After the group split up he returned to New York, where he began living and performing at the National Vaudeville Artists Club. In 1927, he was cast as an Australian in Reggie Hammerstein's musical, Golden Dawn. In the following years, he gained a reputation as a romantic leading man. After a successful screen-test, Paramount producer Bud Schulberg signed a contract with the 27-year-old Grant in 1931 for five years. He made his feature film debut with the comedy This is the Night (Frank Tuttle, 1932), playing an Olympic javelin thrower opposite Thelma Todd and Lili Damita. Grant played a wealthy playboy opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932), directed by Josef von Sternberg. Mae West wanted Grant for She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) because she saw his combination of virility, sexuality and the aura and bearing of a gentleman. The film was a box office hit, earning more than $2 million in the United States. For their next pairing, I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1934), Grant's salary was increased from $450 to $750 a week. The film was even more successful than She Done Him Wrong and saved Paramount from bankruptcy.
When the Paramount contract was up Cary Grant made an unusual decision for the time: he decided to freelance. Because his films were so successful at the box office, he was able to work at any studio he chose for the majority of his career. For Hal Roach's studio, he made the screwball comedy Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937), which became his first major comedy success. The following year, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), featuring a leopard and frequent bickering and verbal jousting between Grant and Hepburn. He played a British army sergeant opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in the adventure film Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939), set at a military station in India, and a pilot opposite Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in the drama Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939). Grant gained even more success for his appearances in the romantic comedies His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) with Rosalind Russell, and The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) with Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart. Along with Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944) and I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, 1949); these films are among the all-time great comedy films. Having established himself as a major Hollywood star, he was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944). In the 1940s, Grant also started a working relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, appearing in films such as Suspicion (1941) opposite Joan Fontaine, and Notorious (1946) opposite Ingrid Bergman. Hitchcock admired Grant and considered him to have been the only actor that he had ever loved working with. In To Catch a Thief (1955), he and Grace Kelly were allowed to improvise some of the dialogue. They knew what Hitchcock wanted to do with a scene, they rehearsed it, put in some clever double entendres that got past the censors, and then the scene was filmed. His biggest box-office success was Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) made with Eva Marie Saint since Kelly was by that time Princess of Monaco.
Cary Grant was young enough to begin the new career of fatherhood when he stopped making movies at age 62. Grant retired from the screen at 62, when his daughter Jennifer was born, to focus on bringing her up and to provide a sense of permanency and stability in her life. Although Grant had retired from the screen, he remained active. In 1966, he accepted a position on the board of directors at Fabergé. By all accounts this position was not honorary, as some had assumed; Grant regularly attended meetings and travelled internationally to support them. The position also permitted the use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother, Dyan Cannon, was working. He later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle, Hollywood, California), Western Airlines (acquired by Delta Air Lines in 1987), and MGM. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Grant the second greatest male star of Golden Age Hollywood cinema (after Humphrey Bogart). He was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor and five times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. After his retirement from film in 1966, Grant was presented with an Honorary Oscar in 1970. He expressed no interest in making a career comeback. He was in good health until almost the end of his life, when he suffered a mild stroke in October 1984. His final appearance at the Academy Awards was in 1985 to present James Stewart with an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the United States in a one-man show, A Conversation with Cary Grant, in which he would show clips from his films and answer audience questions. In 1986, Grant suffered a major stroke prior to performing in his one-man show in Davenport, Iowa. He died later that night at St. Luke's Hospital. Grant had been married five times. His wives were actress Virginia Cherrill (1934-1935), Barbara Hutton (1942-1945), actress Betsy Drake (1949-1962), actress Dyan Cannon (1965-1968), and Barbara Harris (1981-1986). From 1932 till 1944 he shared a house with Randolph Scott, whom he met on Hot Saturday (1932). Studio heads threatened not to employ them together unless they lived separately. Grant's marriage to Barbara Hutton permanently dissolved his living arrangement with Scott. Grant later fell in love with Sophia Loren while filming The Pride and the Passion (1957) when he was 53 and she was 22. At the time, Grant was still married to actress Betsy Drake, and Loren was involved with 45-year-old producer Carlo Ponti, who was also married. Both men eventually separated from their wives and proposed to Loren at the same time; she chose Ponti.
Sources: Dale O'Connor (IMDb), Pedro Borges (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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French postcard in the Collection Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6429, 1994. Photo: Raymond Depardon / Magnum Photos. François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Cargol at the set of L'Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1969).
François Truffaut (1932-1984) was one of the most popular and successful French filmmakers ever. The French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Vague and his main themes were passion, women, childhood, and faithfulness. He created such classics as Les quatre cents coups/The 400 blows (1959), Jules et Jim (1961) and La Nuit Américaine/Day for Night (1973). His life and films were mixed up and one of his quotes is "Cinema is an improvement on life".
François Roland Truffaut was born in 1932 in Paris. He was the son of Jeanine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. An only child, he saw little of his working parents during his childhood. François was raised by his maternal grandmother. His grandmother instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his grandmother until her death when Truffaut was eight years old and he returned to his parents. He began to assiduously go to the cinema. Cinema offered Truffaut the greatest escape from unsatisfying home life. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He frequently skipped school and sneaked into cinemas because he lacked the money for admission. As a teenager, he was involved in petty theft and incidences of violence. François left school at 14 and started teaching himself. Two of his academic goals were to watch three films a day and read three books a week. Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he was exposed to countless foreign films. He became familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped Truffaut out of various financial and criminal situations. In 1950, he enlisted in the French army, hoping to be assigned to the film branch, but he was assigned first to Germany and then to Indochina as an artilleryman. He deserted the army and was put in jail. Again, Bazin came to the rescue and used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma. In 1953 Truffaut published his first film critiques in this magazine, and Truffaut became a defender of Bazin's 'auteur theory'. In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in Cahiers du cinéma, 'Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français' (A Certain Trend of French Cinema), in which he attacked the state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers. His less positive film reviews could be quite brutal and unforgiving. Years later when some of his reviews were published in book format, the director attempted to omit his more savage reviews. The article caused a storm of controversy and landed Truffaut an offer to write for the nationally circulated, more widely read cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles. Truffaut wrote more than 500 film articles for that publication over the next four years. In 1954, Truffaut also directed his first short film, Une Visite/A Visit (1955). Then, he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects. 1957 was an important year for him. He married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor. He also founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse, named after Jean Renoir's Le carrosse d'or/The Golden Coach (1952). And he directed the short film Les mistons/The Mischief Makers (1957), with Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont. It is considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. Another big year for him was 1959. It was the year that his first daughter, Laura Truffaut was born. And his first full-length film was released, the tender, semi-autobiographical Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (1959). The young Jean-Pierre Léaud played Antoine Donel who gradually descends into petty crime. The film became a huge success and Truffaut won the Best Director award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Les quatre cents coups was one of the first highlights of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). This movement gave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette a wider audience. The New Wave dealt with a self-conscious rejection of traditional cinema structure.
François Truffaut followed Antoine Doinel, the lead character in Les quatre cents coups/The 400 blows (1959), from boyhood to adulthood through five films, all starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. The second film was the short Antoine et Colette/Antoine Antoine and Colette (1962). It was made for the anthology film L'amour à 20 ans/Love at Twenty (1962), which featured also shorts from the renowned directors Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini, and Andrzej Wajda. The third film in the series is the feature Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses (1968). In this film, Antoine begins his relationship with Christine Darbon (Claude Jade), which is depicted further in the last two films in the series, Domicile conjugal/Bed & Board (1970) and L'amour en fuite/Love on the Run (1979). Truffaut had a disagreement with his family over the content of some of his films. His family felt that the more autobiographical details represented them in a negative and false light. Unfortunately, the tensions between them remained for the rest of Truffaut's life. Very popular and highly influential was Truffaut's third film, Jules and Jim (1962). Set around the time of World War I, it describes a tragic love triangle involving French Bohemian Jim (Henri Serre), his shy Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jules's girlfriend and later wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Truffaut's other notable films of the 1960s include La peau douce/The Soft Skin (1964), Truffaut's first non-French film Fahrenheit 451 (1966) with Julie Christie, and L'Enfant sauvage/The Wild Child (1970), which included Truffaut's acting debut in the lead role of 18th-century physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. One of his best films is La Nuit Américaine/Day for Night (1973), starring Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Truffaut himself. It is the story of a film crew trying to finish a film while dealing with the personal and professional problems that accompany film making. "La Nuit américaine" (American Night) is the French name for the filmmaking process whereby sequences filmed outdoors in daylight are shot with a filter over the camera lens. In English, the technique is called in English "day for night". The film earned Truffaut the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Later highlights include the historical drama L'Histoire d'Adèle H./The Story of Adèle H. (1975) with Isabelle Adjani, another historical drama Le Dernier Métro/The Last Metro (1980) which starred Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu and garnered 10 Césars, including Best Director, and La Femme d'à côté/The Woman Next Door (1981), the story of a fatal romance between a loving husband (Gérard Depardieu) and the attractive woman (Fanny Ardant) who moves in next door. François Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, and is buried in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, France. He was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1957 till their divorce in 1965. They had two children, Laura Truffaut (1959) and Eva Truffaut (1961) He had long-time relationships with the actresses Claude Jade and Fanny Ardant. With Ardant, he had a daughter, Josephine Truffaut (1982).
Sources: Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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French postcard in the collection Magie Noire by Editions Hazan, no. 6489. Photo: Collection Dominique Lebrun D.R. Alfred Hitchcock promoting Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948).
British director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was known as 'The Master of Suspense'. He is one of the most influential and extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. He had his first major success with The Lodger (1926), a silent thriller loosely based on Jack the Ripper. Hitchcock came to international attention with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and, most notably, The Lady Vanishes (1938). His first Hollywood film was the multi-Oscar-winning psychological thriller Rebecca (1940). Many classics followed including Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films which garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and 6 wins.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London, in 1899. He was the son of Emma Jane Whelan and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock. His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William and Eileen Hitchcock. Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. In 1914, his father died. To support himself and his mother—his older siblings had left home by then—Hitchcock took a job in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in films began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals. In a trade paper, he read that Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, so Hitch produced some drawings for the title cards and sent his work to the studio. They hired him, and in 1919 he began working for Islington Studios as a title-card designer. Hitchcock soon gained experience as a co-writer, art director, and production manager on at least 18 silent films. After Hugh Croise, the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill, Hitchcock and star and producer Seymour Hicks finished the film together. When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as Gainsborough Pictures. He began to collaborate with the editor and "script girl" Alma Reville, his future wife. He worked as an assistant to director Graham Cutts on several films, including The Blackguard (1924), which was produced at the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam. There Hitchcock watched part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924). He was impressed with Murnau's work and later used many of his techniques for the set design in his own productions. In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden (1925), starring Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was assistant director-editor. In 1927, Hitchcock made his first trademark film, the thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) starring Ivor Novello. The Lodger is about the hunt for a serial killer who, wearing a black cloak and carrying a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays. The Lodger was a commercial and critical success in the UK. In the same year, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock (1928). Reville became her husband's closest collaborator and wrote or co-wrote on many of his films. Hitchcock made the transition to sound film with his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), the first British 'talkie'. Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. He used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman (Anny Ondra) suspected of murder. It was followed by Murder! (1930). In 1933 Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). It was a success. His second, The 39 Steps (1935), with Robert Donat, made him a star in the USA. It also established the quintessential English 'Hitchcock blonde' (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. His next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director.[
David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood. He directed an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940), starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture, although Hitchcock himself was only nominated as Best Director. Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), set in Europe, and produced by Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year Suspicion (1941) was the first of four projects on which Cary Grant worked with Hitchcock, and it is one of the rare occasions that Grant was cast in a sinister role. In one scene Hitchcock placed a light inside a glass of milk, perhaps poisoned, that Grant is bringing to his wife, played by Joan Fontaine. The light makes sure that the audience's attention is on the glass. Fontaine won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was Hitchcock's personal favourite. Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright) suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial killer. Hitchcock was again nominated for the Oscar for Best Director for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945), but he never won the award. Spellbound (1945), starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. Notorious (1946) stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, both Hitchcock regulars, and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. After a brief lull of commercial success in the late 1940s, Hitchcock returned to form with Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. In the film, two men casually meet, one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder. He suggests that two people, each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's murder. Farley Granger played the innocent victim of the scheme, while boy-next-door" Robert Walker played the villain. I Confess (1953) was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest. It was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly: the 3-D film Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. in his films, Hitchcock often used the "mistaken identity" theme, such as in The Wrong Man (1956), and North by Northwest (1959). In Vertigo (1958), James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia. He develops an obsession with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Kim Novak). His obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt for a happy ending. Vertigo is one of his most personal and revealing films, dealing with the Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Psycho (1960) was Hitchcock's great shock masterpiece, mostly for its haunting performances by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins and its shower scene, and The Birds (1963) became the unintended forerunner to an onslaught of films about nature-gone-mad, and booth films were phenomenally popular. Film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's': Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), and Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976). During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralysing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. In 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. A year later, in 1980, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
Sources: Bruce Eder (AllMovie), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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French postcard in the Collection Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6109, 1989. Photo: Les films du Carosse, Paris. François Truffaut at the set of Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1961).
François Truffaut (1932-1984) was one of the most popular and successful French filmmakers ever. The French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Vague and his main themes were passion, women, childhood, and faithfulness. He created such classics as Les quatre cents coups/The 400 blows (1959), Jules et Jim (1961) and La Nuit Américaine/Day for Night (1973). His life and films were mixed up and one of his quotes is "Cinema is an improvement on life".
François Roland Truffaut was born in 1932 in Paris. He was the son of Jeanine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. An only child, he saw little of his working parents during his childhood. François was raised by his maternal grandmother. His grandmother instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his grandmother until her death when Truffaut was eight years old and he returned to his parents. He began to assiduously go to the cinema. Cinema offered Truffaut the greatest escape from unsatisfying home life. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He frequently skipped school and sneaked into cinemas because he lacked the money for admission. As a teenager, he was involved in petty theft and incidences of violence. François left school at 14 and started teaching himself. Two of his academic goals were to watch three films a day and read three books a week. Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he was exposed to countless foreign films. He became familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped Truffaut out of various financial and criminal situations. In 1950, he enlisted in the French army, hoping to be assigned to the film branch, but he was assigned first to Germany and then to Indochina as an artilleryman. He deserted the army and was put in jail. Again, Bazin came to the rescue and used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma. In 1953 Truffaut published his first film critiques in this magazine, and Truffaut became a defender of Bazin's 'auteur theory'. In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in Cahiers du cinéma, 'Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français' (A Certain Trend of French Cinema), in which he attacked the state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers. His less positive film reviews could be quite brutal and unforgiving. Years later when some of his reviews were published in book format, the director attempted to omit his more savage reviews. The article caused a storm of controversy and landed Truffaut an offer to write for the nationally circulated, more widely read cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles. Truffaut wrote more than 500 film articles for that publication over the next four years. In 1954, Truffaut also directed his first short film, Une Visite/A Visit (1955). Then, he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects. 1957 was an important year for him. He married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor. He also founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse, named after Jean Renoir's Le carrosse d'or/The Golden Coach (1952). And he directed the short film Les mistons/The Mischief Makers (1957), with Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont. It is considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. Another big year for him was 1959. It was the year that his first daughter, Laura Truffaut was born. And his first full-length film was released, the tender, semi-autobiographical Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (1959). The young Jean-Pierre Léaud played Antoine Donel who gradually descends into petty crime. The film became a huge success and Truffaut won the Best Director award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Les quatre cents coups was one of the first highlights of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). This movement gave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette a wider audience. The New Wave dealt with a self-conscious rejection of traditional cinema structure.
François Truffaut followed Antoine Doinel, the lead character in Les quatre cents coups/The 400 blows (1959), from boyhood to adulthood through five films, all starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. The second film was the short Antoine et Colette/Antoine Antoine and Colette (1962). It was made for the anthology film L'amour à 20 ans/Love at Twenty (1962), which featured also shorts from the renowned directors Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini, and Andrzej Wajda. The third film in the series is the feature Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses (1968). In this film, Antoine begins his relationship with Christine Darbon (Claude Jade), which is depicted further in the last two films in the series, Domicile conjugal/Bed & Board (1970) and L'amour en fuite/Love on the Run (1979). Truffaut had a disagreement with his family over the content of some of his films. His family felt that the more autobiographical details represented them in a negative and false light. Unfortunately, the tensions between them remained for the rest of Truffaut's life. Very popular and highly influential was Truffaut's third film, Jules and Jim (1962). Set around the time of World War I, it describes a tragic love triangle involving French Bohemian Jim (Henri Serre), his shy Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jules's girlfriend and later wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Truffaut's other notable films of the 1960s include La peau douce/The Soft Skin (1964), Truffaut's first non-French film Fahrenheit 451 (1966) with Julie Christie, and L'Enfant sauvage/The Wild Child (1970), which included Truffaut's acting debut in the lead role of 18th-century physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. One of his best films is La Nuit Américaine/Day for Night (1973), starring Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Truffaut himself. It is the story of a film crew trying to finish a film while dealing with the personal and professional problems that accompany film making. "La Nuit américaine" (American Night) is the French name for the filmmaking process whereby sequences filmed outdoors in daylight are shot with a filter over the camera lens. In English, the technique is called in English "day for night". The film earned Truffaut the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Later highlights include the historical drama L'Histoire d'Adèle H./The Story of Adèle H. (1975) with Isabelle Adjani, another historical drama Le Dernier Métro/The Last Metro (1980) which starred Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu and garnered 10 Césars, including Best Director, and La Femme d'à côté/The Woman Next Door (1981), the story of a fatal romance between a loving husband (Gérard Depardieu) and the attractive woman (Fanny Ardant) who moves in next door. François Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, and is buried in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, France. He was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1957 till their divorce in 1965. They had two children, Laura Truffaut (1959) and Eva Truffaut (1961) He had long-time relationships with the actresses Claude Jade and Fanny Ardant. With Ardant, he had a daughter, Josephine Truffaut (1982).
Sources: Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
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