Louis Malle, Acclaimed Film Director, Dies at 63 : Movies: Oscar nominee was at vanguard of French New Wave cinema.

By ELAINE DUTKA and BURT A. FOLKART

Nov. 25, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Louis Malle, a pioneer of French New Wave cinema and one of the more versatile of modern directors, died at his Beverly Hills home of complications resulting from lymphoma. He was 63.

Malle, who underwent extensive heart surgery in early 1993, was found to have cancer of the lymph nodes and a resulting immune deficiency this past spring.

At his side when he died Thursday were his wife, actress Candice Bergen, and their 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, who plan to accompany his body to France for burial. His brother and producing partner, Vincent Malle, was also present.

Malle was twice nominated for Academy Awards as a screenwriter and once as a director, but never won. His “The Silent World” was awarded the Oscar for best documentary in 1956, but the statuette was collected by the film’s producer and co-director, Jacques Cousteau.

Just last year, the elegant, civilized Malle distanced himself from New Wave directors such as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, calling the banner “an association of convenience” and labeling their tactics divisive and extreme. Still, Malle was a ground-breaker, injecting a dose of realism into Hollywood fare. The two dozen movies he directed help push the boundaries of what was acceptable on screen.

“The Lovers” (1959), although tame by today’s standards, was sexually provocative for its time. “Murmur of the Heart” (1971) delved into a son’s incestuous feelings for his mother. “Pretty Baby” (1978) featured Brooke Shields as a 12-year-old prostitute. “Damage” (1992) told the story of a British politician’s obsession with his son’s fiancee.

“Each of these movies was unconventional,” longtime Times movie reviewer Kevin Thomas said Friday. “But in each instance, they were triumphs of taste. Malle liked shooting in America but wanted to make the same kind of films here that he made in France--personal films with a compassionate understanding of human nature.”

Eclectic and broad-ranging in his themes, Malle based his highly acclaimed “My Dinner With Andre” (1981) on the dinner-table conversation of two men, and shot his last film, “Vanya on 42nd Street” (1994) on the floor of New York’s derelict New Amsterdam Theater, where he staged the Chekhov play.

Malle, who provided a memorable glimpse of Americana in 1981’s “Atlantic City,” and a more forgettable portrait of the clash between American and Vietnamese fisherman in 1985’s “Alamo Bay,” also targeted World War II. In “Lacombe, Lucien,” he told the story of an impressionable young man who became a Nazi tool, and his semi-autobiographical “Au Revoir, les Enfants” was set during the Nazi occupation of France. The latter won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and seven Cesars, the French Oscar.

That film, along with “Murmur of the Heart,” earned Malle Oscar nominations for original screenplay. He was nominated as best director for “Atlantic City.”

Malle actually came to notice as a cameraman rather than director or writer--not working for one of the nouvelle vague directors with whom he was to be associated most of his life, but for oceanographer-adventurer Cousteau.

Malle was the son of a wealthy French industrialist. Although he was part Jewish, he was educated by Jesuits and then by Catholic monks in Fontainebleau who provided shelter for Jewish boys at the height of World War II. A disgruntled lay employee notified the Gestapo, and the monks and Jewish youths were sent to concentration camps. But the Malles moved to the south of France and spent the remainder of the war in the relative safety of a Resistance pocket.

The experience never was far from Malle’s mind.

“I remember much better 1944 than what happened three years ago,” he told an interviewer in the 1970s.

In 1987 he made “Au Revoir, les Enfants,” considered by many to be his finest picture. In it he confronted not only the horror of World War II, but a friendship he had suppressed with one of the Jewish boys sent to his death.

Malle attended the University of Paris, where his parents hoped he would pursue political science. But cinema had piqued his interest and he enrolled at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques. Leaving to become Cousteau’s assistant, he sailed for months on Cousteau’s seagoing studio/laboratory and worked on the feature-length documentary “The Silent World,” which won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Festival in 1956.

In 1959 he established himself and actress Jeanne Moreau with “The Lovers,” a sensuous, critically acclaimed examination of the French bourgeoisie that Catholic France condemned for its explicitness. And, through the 1960s, he solidified the leitmotif of his work: Cherish independence while avoiding big studios and bigger budgets so that you only have to please yourself.

“The Fire Within” (1963), a study of a suicidal alcoholic, further established Malle’s dramatic credentials, after which he made a sharp turnabout in 1965’s “Viva Maria!” in which Brigitte Bardot and Moreau were at their comedic best. While he was garnering critical acclaim, however, Malle confessed to a growing weariness with commercial pictures. Reporting for French television, Malle had traveled to Algeria, Vietnam and Thailand in the early 1960s--a brush with reality that made him, as he put it, “tired of actors, studios, fiction and Paris.”

Divorcing his first wife, Anne-Marie Deschodt, the director sold his home and set off on what was to be a six-month odyssey to India and what he later called the most significant experience of his life.

“It made me re-examine all my values--like psychoanalysis, except that it didn’t take three years and all those visits to a doctor to discover myself,” he told Viva magazine in 1975.

“It was almost like a drug trip, really, diving into yourself through reflection. What I saw in India, that paradise of the exotic, that is what really changed my life.”

With a commission from the British Broadcasting Corp., Malle crisscrossed India for two years. He wound up with 40 hours of film, which he narrated himself and edited into eight separate programs. The series became a critical success and an embarrassment to the government that had produced it--providing a gut-wrenching examination of the poverty and squalor that dominated the life of the average Indian.

“Calcutta” (1969), the first of the televised films, won the Melbourne Film Festival’s Grand Prix and was released the following year in the United States. The 40 hours of deprivation surrounded by opulence and mysticism was edited into seven other programs, collectively titled “Phantom India,” which the New York Times found “a towering, memorable film that engulfs the viewer” with images of “ancient traditions alongside staggering modern complexities.”

In 1980, Malle married Bergen, an actress 14 years his junior who went on to become the Emmy-award winning star of TV’s “Murphy Brown.” Spending most of his time in Paris, the director headed for Los Angeles every other month to spend time with his wife and daughter. “People who don’t know better think it’s a glamorous arrangement,” Bergen told Cosmopolitan magazine in 1993. “But long-distance communication puts a strain on the marriage. That we’ve made it at all is a testament to how much we both wanted it.”

She was attracted to his relentless curiosity, the actress said, and he to her sense of humor. “I can act as a fool and he finds it in him to laugh. Not every man would--most especially a French New Wave director. Louis and I are great loners and neither of us had much luck with romance. We look out for ourselves and then come together. We give each other a lot of freedom neither of us ends up wanting.”

Malle’s heart trouble and a bout with viral pneumonia in June led him to cancel plans to shoot a movie about Marlene Dietrich. Based on a book by Dietrich’s daughter, it was to have starred Uma Thurman.

The director’s pervasive love of movies, said Times film critic Kenneth Turan, was never more evident than during Malle’s stint as jury president at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Two top-notch films, “The Piano” and “Farewell, My Concubine,” were competing for the Palme D’Or.

“Splitting the award was discouraged by the festival, which feared it would dilute the prize,” Turan said. “But using his considerable sway, Malle lobbied the jury to honor them both. Malle cared about films . . . and not just his own. This was the film lovers’ decision rather than a political one.”

Besides his wife and daughter, Malle is survived by five brothers and sisters and two other children from previous relationships.

Pat Kingsley, a spokeswoman for Bergen, said a memorial service in New York is planned for early next year.

* AN APPRECIATION: F1

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The Films of Louis Malle

A list of films by French director Louis Malle, who died Thursday at the age of 63:

* “Le Monde du Silence” / “The Silent World,” co-directed with Jacques Cousteau (1956)

* “Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud” / “Frantic” (1957)

* “Les Amants” / “The Lovers” (1959)

* “Zazie Dans le Metro” / “Zazie in the Underground” (1960)

* “Vie Privee” / “A Very Private Affair” (1962)

* “Le Feu Follet” / “The Fire Within” (1963)