Jean Delannoy, 1908 - 2008.

Jean Delannoy, a French director of lavish mid-20th-century film dramas whose career suffered after he was publicly reviled by proponents of the New Wave as the ultimate anti-auteur, died on Wednesday at his home in Guainville, France, west of Paris. He was 100....

He believed that a director's job was to realize the work of the scriptwriters; Truffaut considered that attitude contemptuous of film as an art form. Jean-Luc Godard shared Truffaut's opinion, once suggesting that when Mr Delannoy carried a briefcase to the studio, he might as well be going to an insurance office....

Mr Delannoy devoted much of his career to religious films, including La Symphonie Pastorale and Dieu A Besoin des Hommes, which Bosley Crowther, writing in the Times in 1951, called a "film of rare and simple beauty" that "goes boldly and squarely to the heart of the fundamental nature of religion in the best tradition of French intellect and art."

Anita Gates, New York Times.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2008 12:23 AM