Appreciation : Farewell to Malle and What Might Have Been

When the great director Ernst Lubitsch died, someone said, “How sad; no more Ernst Lubitsch.” Billy Wilder replied, “How tragic; no more Ernst Lubitsch films.”

Just the same thing can be said about the death from cancer Thursday of Louis Malle, at the age of 63. He was a slight, dark, vital, intense and entirely charming man who, with all else, loved American films and was fascinated by the American experience.

One year, during the Cannes festival, Malle hosted a radio interview with Groucho Marx, who was on hand to receive a medal from the French government. (“How much can I hock it for?” Groucho asked the minister of culture, with a lift of the famous eyebrows.) Malle proved to know the Marx Brothers films better scene by scene than Groucho did (or, perhaps, than Groucho remembered).

As the obituaries will record, Malle was born to great wealth in provincial France, his industrialist family being among other things the largest sugar refiners in the country. Malle reflected the family ambience in “Murmur of the Heart,” one of the best of his many superb and sensitive films. He handled the theme of a boy’s incestuous love for his mother with a sympathetic delicacy that avoided any hint of exploitation. Was it autobiographical, he was once asked. “Not . . . precisely,” he said with a cryptic smile, adding that his mother had enjoyed the film.

What is beyond doubt his most moving work, “Au Revoir, Les Enfants,” was unquestionably autobiographical, born of his wartime childhood years in a strict Catholic private school where one or more Jewish boys were given refuge but betrayed to the local Gestapo. Where fact and fiction parted--he made the betrayer a kitchen helper--mattered little; the sense of being a child living in a defeated land with its particular horrific anxieties was felt soul-deep.

So it was in “Lacombe, Lucien,” his chronicle of a decent, not overly bright youth fatefully seduced into German service.

Malle’s “The Lovers,” controversial in its time (1958) for its sexual suggestiveness, proved eventually to ease some of the legal restrictions on the content of American films.

At that it is the range of his films that seems so memorable about Malle’s work, from the joyous romp of “Zazie Dans Le Metro” to the somber intensity of “The Fire Within,” a portrait of a suicidal alcoholic’s last hours, and to “My Dinner With Andre,” controversial in quite a different way for its feature-length recording of two men having a meal.

His capacity for surprise, in form and content, never left him: His last film, “Vanya on 42nd Street,” found a unique new way to look at the play by seeing it through the eyes of a company preparing it.

Like other filmmakers from abroad, from Billy Wilder himself to John Schlesinger, Malle brought a freshly perceptive eye to this country. His portraits of Burt Lancaster as an aging small-time hoodlum in “Atlantic City” and Brooke Shields as a hooker’s daughter and hooker-in-the-making in turn-of-the-century New Orleans in “Pretty Baby,” were sympathetic and non-judgmental toward the subjects, but unsparingly candid about the milieus in which they had their being.

Having begun as co-director of “The Silent World” with Jacques Cousteau, he was always the observer, and his monumental documentary “Phantom India,” was the observer at his most insightful. But there, as in his fiction films, he was never remote or coolly detached. The watcher cared and felt, and wanted to share what he was seeing and feeling.

Malle loved the medium with a passion--a uniting characteristic of the otherwise disparate talents of the New Wave. But at last he was neither a conjurer nor a glossy, big-budget entertainer like--ah well, take your pick; he was first and last a wise recording witness to our times.

He was still at the peak of his gifts when illness struck him, and as Wilder suggested about Lubitsch, I mourn the loss of a friend and of films now never to be seen.

Editor’s Note--Sunday’s Calendar section, with Candice Bergen on the cover, was printed before the death Thursday of her husband, Louis Malle.