French director of La Riviere du Hibou, a short film with a twist in the tail
ROBERT ENRICO, who has died aged 69, owed such fame as he enjoyed beyond his native France to a single short film, running only 27 minutes, which he made in 1961.
La Riviere du Hibou, shot in black and white and set in the American Civil War, claimed top prize at a festival of short films in Tours in 1961, went on to take the Palme d’Or at Cannes the following year, and two years later won an Oscar as best short film under the title Incident at Owl Creek. The source was a story by the 19th-century American writer Ambrose Bierce, originally called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Few short films have taken the world by storm quite so quickly and spectacularly. Its appeal lay in the skill with which Enrico concealed the twist in the tail.
On a rickety bridge built across a river, a civilian is strung up for summary execution for partisan activities. At the last minute, the rope breaks; he plunges into the river and is able to swim to freedom, lose himself in the woods and make his way home. As the film ends, however, the noose tightens around his neck and it becomes clear that the escape is a fantasy conjured up in his mind in the seconds before death. Forty years on, the surprise ending is more easily guessed, but audiences were hugely impressed at the time, hailing it as a classic.
At first the film was the making of Enrico. Flushed with success, he was able to turn it into a trilogy of short stories, released as Au Coeur de la Vie (1962). This had always been his intention, but he had planned to bracket it with stories set in the Spanish Civil War and the Algerian conflict.
The idea was rejected by his producer, who raised no objection, however, to linking Incident at Owl Creek to two other stories by Bierce – Chickamauga and Mocking Bird, one an account of war seen through the eyes of a child, the other a family ghost story.
The trilogy was received politely, but failed to find a wide public. Though it was contemporary with the early films of such New Wave directors as Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, unlike them it smacked of academicism. It was almost a text-book example of how to make a good film. There was a reason for this. Enrico had attended the French film school, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques (known acronymically as IDHEC), whereas Truffaut and his friends were self-taught.
Alongside the New Wave, Enrico’s work began to seem old hat while he was still in his thirties. It affected the future course of his career. When his second feature film, La Belle Vie (1963), found difficulty in landing a distributor, he took stock of his prospects and veered increasingly towards commercial projects featuring the top stars of the day – Romy Schneider, Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon.
Many of his films were box office hits and he was seldom short of work, both in the cinema and television, but a career that had begun with such promise became snared in run-of-the-mill action pictures.
Robert Enrico was born on April 13 1931 in Lievin, northern France, of Italian descent. At a young age he moved to Toulon, where his father ran a bicycle shop. He had been a racing champion and always hoped that his son would follow in his tracks. Indeed, Robert Enrico did once take part in the Tour de France, but fared so badly he never tried again.
His interest in the arts was fired at school and he became closely involved at the Sorbonne in theatrical work. After graduating from film school in the early Fifties, he began directing shorts for television and subsequently for the army during military service.
His professional career began in 1959 with a short film, Ville Lumiere, which was shown widely at festivals and took the top prize that year in Rouen. The film that really made waves, however, was Thaumetopoea (1960), which triumphed at Tours, won the bronze medal at the Venice festival in 1960 and over the next two years attracted prizes in Bilbao, Rabat and Berlin.
Thaumetopoea was a documentary, commissioned by the French Ministry of Agriculture, about a species of insect whose grubs devour trees. Enrico dramatised the subject, turning what might have been merely a worthy assignment into a new kind of documentary with overtones of science fiction.
Thanks to this early success, he was able to shoot La Riviere du Hibou, though the production was not without problems. On the second day of shooting, the lead actor broke his foot jumping into the stream and all the scenes of him running from the place of execution had to be put on hold for two months.
For the sequence in which he negotiates the rapids before making his way to freedom, Enrico used an oyster diver from Tahiti as a stand-in, but every time he went below the surface, he would bob up again too quickly. So Enrico arranged for him to be weighted with lead. It proved all too effective and when, after 60 seconds, he had not surfaced, the producer had to dive into the water to save him.
After consolidating La Riviere du Hibou into the portmanteau picture Au Coeur de la Vie, Enrico embarked on the Algerian war story that he had originally intended as one of the episodes of that film. It emerged as La Belle Vie, about a soldier returning to civilian life after service in Algeria, but experiencing difficulty in re-integrating into society. The film proved too downbeat for general audiences and was only patchily released.
It was a bitter lesson that drove him in future to avoid controversial themes, though Tante Zita (1968), about a young girl (Joanna Shimkus) discovering the true meaning of death while living with her elderly aunt (Katina Paxinou), struck a sombre note.
More typical were Les Grandes Gueules (The Jailbird’s Vacation) of 1965, Les Aventuriers (1967), Boulevard du Rhum (1971), with Bardot and Lino Ventura, Les Caids (1972), a macho movie about the Paras, and Le Vieux Fusil (1976), drawing on his own wartime experience. For that film, he won the Cesar award, the French equivalent of an Oscar.
Enrico was a prolific director, whose later work achieved consistent popular success in the domestic market but was rarely seen in this country. His last film was Fait d’Hiver (1999). He was also active in French television, for which he made the mini-series Au Nom de Tous les Miens (1983), and La Derniere Mission, a study of Saint-Exupery.
Robert Enrico married Lucienne Hamon (dissolved), by whom he had a daughter. He had a second daughter by the film editor Patricia Neny. —telegraph.co.uk
