Rebel Without a Cause

By the time that Jeanne Moreau cut the cake for his twenty-fifth birthday on the set of Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle had already been joint winner of an Oscar for his work on Jacques Cousteau's documentary The Silent World. In view of this astonishing success, it is chilling to read the note that the 20-year-old Malle had written on Christmas Day 1952: "Lord Satan, I give you my soul and promise to be your loyal servant if you give me genius, love and cinematographic success in the next five years." Malle's transaction with the devil revealed something important about his relationship with his own conservative, Catholic bourgeois family and particularly with his mother. Superficially he reacted against this background. He became a filmmaker instead of going to the École Polytechnique and joining the family business, he traveled constantly, he had three children by three different women and in his films he constantly mocked the world into which he had been born.

Yet Malle's mockery of provincial conservatism never meant that he entirely renounced its values--as the hero of his 1971 tale of incest, Murmur of the Heart, remarks, "Blasphemy has no thrill for those who have ceased to believe." Malle remained on good terms with his family, especially his long-suffering mother. Indeed, good terms with his family were the basis of Malle's precocious success, since the wealth that he derived from being a member of the Béghin sugar dynasty enabled him to found his own production company.

Pierre Billard's new biography, Le rebelle solitaire, perceptively links Malle's films to his background and life. It fills an important gap because the most important work previously published on Malle--Philip French's collection of interviews published under the title Malle on Malle (1993)--was rather discreet about Malle's private life (French never suggested that Malle's relations with Moreau, Brigitte Bardot and Susan Sarandon, among other leading ladies, might have had a nonprofessional dimension). Billard brings out Malle's charm but also hints at his less likable features; at one point, for example, the director insisted that script girls working on his films should wear blouses with extra big pockets so they could carry his tobacco and pipes for him.

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