Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974)

Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, written by Malle and Patrick Modiano, was a great success, winning several prizes. However, due to the subject of the film – it was one of the first to deal with collaboration in France in World War II – it came in for some strong criticism, Malle left for the States and it was not until thirteen years later that he made another film in France, which was the one I recently mentioned here, Avoir les enfants (1987).

Lucien Lacombe (Pierre Blaise) is a seventeen-year-old peasant in mid-1944, when the Allies were gaining considerable ground in Normandy. Lacombe asks his teacher (Jean Bousquet), a member of the Resistance, if he'll let him join the maquis, but is told that he's too young. By chance, he's stopped by the police, denounces his teacher and becomes a member of the French Gestapo, meaning that he's working for the German police.

His problems start though when Albert Horn (Holger Löwenadler), a German Jew and a tailor, makes a suit for him: he falls in love with Albert's daughter France (Aurore Clément), who's a French Jew. Matters are complicated not just by the fact that Lacombe is in theory anti-Jewish but that he is culturally the reverse of the Horns. Albert is captured by the Germans, and, faced with the dilemma of France and her grandmother Bella (Therese Giehse) being captured, Lacombe kills the arresting German and drives them towards Spain. But the car breaks down and a note across the scene ends the film by saying that Lacombe was captured by the Resistance and executed after trial.

Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987)

Louis Malle had for a long time wanted to make this film, which is partly autobiographical, having remained in his memory since the time of the events. Originally the title was to be in English: My Little Madeleine', alluding to Proust's famous epiphany, although 'Au revoir les enfants' was chosen in the end. This relates on a general level to a goodbye to the Jewish children lost to the Nazis, although more specifically to the final words of Père Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud) as he's led out of the school with the three Jewish children by the Nazis. His next words, 'À bientôt', are obviously ironic because everyone present, including the most naive child in the school yard, knows that he won't see them soon, or ever again: Jean Kippelstein alias Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), Negus and Dupré will die in Auschwitz, Père Jean in Mauthausen.

Malle went to a religious school in Avon near Fontainebleu although the film is set in the Institution Sainte-Croix, Provins, Seine-et-Marne. Near the beginning we see the children coming from Mass singing the nursery rhyme 'À la claire fontaine', which is very significant: although the boys only appear to sing the first verse with its joy of bathing in the fountain, the chorus 'Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais je ne t'oublierai' and following verses tell of sadness and loss: there are many versions of the song and it can be construed as depicting a loss of innocence or a revolutionary spirit, but a probable constant is regret. Although Malle to some extent is identifiable here as Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse), he never befriended anyone Jewish at school, and the mention of 'Sherlock Holmes' in the film relates to the detective work that Malle did after the event.

What we have is an account of privileged schoolchildren during the war living with their fantasies, the amusements which they are allowed in such a fascist environment in which the head of the school 'illegally' harbours three Jewish children mixing freely with the Catholics under a false patronym. Certainly Jean and the other Jewish children live in constant fear, they have to bear such insults as words like 'youtres' ('yids') bandied around by the other children, they have to conceal their hatred of pork, and (most telling of all) they have to hide the fact that they don't have foreskins.

Julien's slow friendship with Jean is not an autobiographical mirror of Malle's friendship with a Jewish boy at the school, but an account not of false memory but fictional retrospection, a kind of idealised reconstruction. Not, though, that the film is in any way sentimental or polarising: the Germans are not always monsters and on one occasion return the lost Julian and (ironically) the lost Jean to the school. But on the other hand there are French people who collaborate with the fascists and the sacked kitchen helper Joseph (François Négret) informed on the Jews in the school.

In 1990, after the desecration of graves in Carpentras, Lionel Jospin recommended that teachers show this film to pupils, which is an indication of the power of this film, and of the cinema in general. Super stuff.

Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud | Elevator to the Gallows | Lift to the Scaffold (1958)

There's a fascinating interview first published in the Cahiers des amis de Roger Nimier 6 (1989) in which Marc Dambre interviews Louis Malle, who talks about Ascenseur pour un échafaud. After working as Robert Bresson's assistant he wrote a script which producers weren't interested in. Then his friend Alain Cavalier introduced him to Noël Calef's book: the idea of a person accused of murder in his absence appealed to Malle, who then decided that he wanted to work on a script with Roger Nimier as he liked his novels. This was to be Malle's first film as a director.

The part of Jeanne Moreau as Florence Carala doesn't exist in the book. Then, she had been making a name for herself as a theatre actor and had played in film noirs with Jean Gabin, but it was with Ascenseur that she began to be really recognised. Malle originally saw the film as an 'exercise de style', but thirty years later he saw himself then as an ambitious person trying to come to terms with his love of both Bresson and Hitchcock. Nimier hated the novel, but they continued re-working it until they returned to Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) stuck in the lift of the Carala building after killing Simon Carala (Jean Wall), with the young Louis (Georges Poujouly) killing the German Benckers as his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin) looks on, and Moreau being added to flesh out the story.

Malle would work on the script with Nimier in the evening until midnight and then they'd go and join Antoine Blondin, although he adds that he didn't like getting in a car with Nimier! He describes his former self and friends as 'Happy, pessimistic "dandies", mocking the Bourgeois-Stalinist intelligentsia of the period.' (The interview was translated by Hugo Frey.)

Another interesting fact is that, after watching the film twice, Miles Davis wrote the music – the mournful wailing trumpet – one night between ten in the evening and six in the morning. A number of people speak of how much the music enhances the film, although I'm not too sure: I think it's way too loud.