Jean Delannoy

Biography: life and films

Jean Delannoy was born on 12th January 1908 in Noisy-le-Sec, France. After working for a short time as an actor, Jean Delannoy took up a post as a film editor for Paramount française in the early 1930s, before embarking on his long and distinguished career as a film director.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, Delannoy made a succession of major works which established him as one of the most respected directors of his era. These include: Macao, l'enfer du jeu (1939), Pontcarral colonel d'empire (1942), L'Éternel retour (1943), La Symphonie Pastorale (1946) and Les Jeux sont faits (1947). He worked with some of the finest actors of his time, including Michèle Morgan, Jean Marais and - of course - Jean Gabin, who played the famous Inspecteur Maigret twice for Delannoy.

Delannoy's penchant for lavish film dramas earned him the reputation of the standard bearer for the qualité française in French cinema. He was very much a traditional film director, insisting that his role was to realise the work of his script writers to the best of his ability, rather than imposing his own artistic vision on the film. This explains why we see far more of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and André Gide (to name just three of his script writers) in his films than Jean Delannoy himself.

This conventional approach to film-making made him the principal target for a new breed of auteur directors, known collectively as La Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave). As a critic and later a director, François Truffaut vociferously attacked Delannoy for his style of direction, arguing that a film director should not just be content with servicing the needs of his script or his actors. Delannoy unwittingly ended up helping Truffaut's argument by directing some mediocre films during the late 1950s.

Whether it was because of such onslaughts from his New Wave opponents or whether it was because his style of film was becoming out-dated, Delannoy's film-making career fell into decline in the early 1960s. He turned to television in the 1970s, directing TV dramas, before returning to film in the late 1980s, with the first of his religious dramas, La Passion de Bernadette (1988). For his outstanding contribution to French culture, Jean Delannoy was awarded two of his country's greatest distinctions, the Légion d'Honneur and the National Order of Merit. He died on 18th June 2008, aged 100.

Filmography