It is no surprise to learn that the Parisian Granier-Deferre, after studying at l’Idhec (L’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), started his career as assistant on a number of solid mainstream films, several directed by the workmanlike Denys de La Patellière and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, some featuring the great Jean Gabin, still trailing his past glory. He was also assistant on L’Air de Paris (1954), starring Gabin and Arletty, directed by Marcel Carné, one of the leading representatives of le cinéma de qualité, which the new wave reacted against but which, particularly Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, eventually came to admire.
When Granier-Deferre began to direct films himself in 1962, he continued in the same tradition, featuring many of the monstres sacrés of the French cinema – Gabin, Simone Signoret, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Romy Schneider, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort – and working on the scripts with a number of contemporary novelists whose… read more
It is no surprise to learn that the Parisian Granier-Deferre, after studying at l’Idhec (L’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), started his career as assistant on a number of solid mainstream films, several directed by the workmanlike Denys de La Patellière and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, some featuring the great Jean Gabin, still trailing his past glory. He was also assistant on L’Air de Paris (1954), starring Gabin and Arletty, directed by Marcel Carné, one of the leading representatives of le cinéma de qualité, which the new wave reacted against but which, particularly Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, eventually came to admire.
When Granier-Deferre began to direct films himself in 1962, he continued in the same tradition, featuring many of the monstres sacrés of the French cinema – Gabin, Simone Signoret, Alain Delon, Lino Ventura, Romy Schneider, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort – and working on the scripts with a number of contemporary novelists whose books he adapted. However, the novelist he most adored, and whom he adapted more than any other, was Georges Simenon, though the latter never contributed to the screenplays.
Granier-Deferre’s films are among the best of the dozens based on Simenon. “What interests me in Simenon is the ambiguity and ordinary madness of his characters which manifests itself at the least disturbance. I don’t despise action, but I have a penchant for psychology. I’m a director of chamber works.”
This is well displayed in his first Simenon adaptation, Le Chat (The Cat, 1971), with Gabin and Signoret as an ageing married couple, who spend their days in a rundown house on the edge of Paris. Locked in mutual hatred and contempt, they are intent on causing each other misery. The action is minimal and the dialogue almost non-existent. Yet, by dint of inspired casting and a sensitivity in imparting meaning to objects and small gestures, Granier-Deferre manages to sustain interest throughout. And, naturally, the double act of the leads, both of whom won acting awards in Berlin that year, is marvellous to watch.
This was followed in the same year by another Simenon adaptation, La Veuve Couderc (The Widow Couderc), this time with Signoret in the title role opposite Alain Delon, 14 years her junior, as a fugitive to whom she gives shelter. Their love affair is brilliantly acted out against the background of the rise of fascism (it is 1934 in rural France), subtly invoked by Granier-Deferre.
Le Train (The Last Train, 1973) is set in France in 1940 at the time of the German invasion. It again concentrates on the relationship of a couple – he (Jean-Louis Trintignant), separated from his wife and child, and she (Schneider), a Jew, fleeing the Nazis. Blending black-and-white with colour photography, and keeping the film intimate while horrendous events take place, Granier-Deferre again finds the right tone for the Simenon story.
L’Étoile du Nord (The Northern Star, 1982) is set in a Belgian boarding house in the 1930s in which world-weary Noiret fascinates the landlady Signoret with his tales of Egypt, but he has blanked out the memory of his murder of an Egyptian millionaire on the Paris-Amsterdam express of the title. Despite some bizarre alterations to Simenon’s novel Le Locataire (The Lodger), previously filmed in 1939 (destroyed) and 1947, it is good old-fashioned narrative cinema, assured by the contribution of the veteran screenwriter Jean Aurenche.
After making his last feature film in 1995, Granier-Deferre returned to Simenon by writing 16 feature-length Inspector Maigret episodes for television with Bruno Crémer in the title role, directing three of them. Among his other notable films, from a different source, but with an air of Simenon’s stifling atmosphere about them, were Le Cage (The Trap, 1975), a thriller with Ventura and Ingrid Thulin as a vengeful couple, and Une Étrange Affaire (A Strange Affair, 1981), with Piccoli and Nathalie Baye.
Granier-Deferre was an amiable and modest man, seldom seen without a large cigar. He is survived by a son with the British actor Susan Hampshire, to whom he was married from 1967 to 1974, and whom he directed in Paris in August (1966), four children by an earlier marriage and a later one by the circus star Annie Fratellini.
Pierre Granier-Deferre, film and television director, born July 22 1927; died November 16 2007. —guardian.co.uk
