Claude Autant-Lara; French Filmmaker, Politician

Claude Autant-Lara, 98, the French director known for his caustic jabs at bourgeois society and his right-wing political stances late in life. One of France’s most prolific directors, Autant-Lara directed more than 30 films, many of them classics of 1940s and 1950s French cinema. His career reached its height in the 1950s with such films as “Le Diable au Corps,” (“Devil in the Flesh”), which scandalized France with its account of a schoolboy’s affair with a woman whose husband was away at war. Born in 1901 to an architect father and an actress mother, Autant-Lara discovered the cinema while studying at France’s prestigious School of Fine Arts. He made his first short films in the 1920s before heading to Hollywood in the 1930s to supervise the French versions of Buster Keaton films, among others. Some of his best-known works include “Le Rouge et le Noir,” (“The Red and the Black”), based on Stendahl’s novel, and “La Traversee de Paris,” or “Four Bags Full,” an account of two men stealthily crossing Paris at night during the German occupation. Autant-Lara was not popular with New Wave filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut, who criticized his films as outdated and scorned his reliance on the dialogue and plots of his screenwriters. By the 1970s, Autant-Lara’s career was in decline, and his last film, “Gloria,” was largely ignored by critics. The filmmaker took the spotlight again during the 1980s, when he came out in support of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. Autant-Lara was elected to the European Parliament in 1989 as a member of the far-right National Front, though he soon resigned after the monthly magazine “Globe” quoted him as saying a French politician who survived a concentration camp had been “missed” by the Nazis. On Saturday at a clinic in Antibes after a long illness.