Direct style of a man who surfed on the cinema's New Wave

Sheila Johnston looks back on the career of a true craftsman

Compared with his contemporaries in the French New Wave, a movement to which he never properly belonged, Louis Malle had an unusually broad and solid background in film-making. He studied at the prestigious Paris film school IDHEC. He worked as an assistant to Jacques Cousteau on his celebrated underwater documentary The Silent World (1956), and to Robert Bresson on the latter's spare prison drama A Man Escaped (1956). And he was the cameraman on Jacques Tati's deadpan comedy Mon Oncle (1957).

When he himself began directing, the New Wave was beginning to break in France. But, in contrast to the bold stylistic innovations of Godard or Truffaut, Malle preferred a more classical, humanist manner: he once said that his kind of cinema was based on the human face.

Telling the story as directly as possible was of prime importance, and his quiet craftsmanship was of a high order. Next to New Wave classics such as Breathless or Shoot the Pianist, his work at first seemed faintly old-fashioned, but his career proved more durable, certainly in box-office terms.

Malle's first film, Lift to the Scaffold (1957), was a thriller-with- a-twist distinguished by its mordant black humour and Miles Davies' moody jazz score. It was swiftly followed by The Lovers, a love story about an adulterous bourgeois wife whose sexual candour caused a controversy at the time. Pretty Baby (1978), his first American film, seemed hamstrung by its potentially explosive subject: child exploitation and pornography. Damage (1992), about a British politician's sleazy affair with a much younger woman, was perceived as stiff and occasionally risible.

His films, generally, were very varied and uneven in both style and achievement, ranging from Viva Maria! (1965), a broadly comic period adventure with Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, to Atlantic City (1981), a low-key love story that provided a touching vehicle for an ageing Burt Lancaster. He also spent six months in India in the late Sixties, which yielded some fine and unflinching documentary film.

He directed several sharp films set during the Second World War: Lacombe Lucien (1973), an exploration of what turns a peasant boy into a Nazi collaborator, and Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), about the doomed friendship between two schoolboys, one Gentile, one Jewish. The emotional impact of this film, based on a sad event from Malle's own childhood, made it one of his most effective and popular films.

He worked for a long spell in the United States, not out of ambition but because he had fallen in love with and married the actress Candice Bergen. He was also disheartened by the conformism and cultural stagnation that had set in under Giscard D'Estaing.

Although by no means all his American films were successful, he is virtually the only modern French director to have gained a toehold across the Atlantic. He had the very rare knack of being able to make films with a broad appeal without ever turning out slick Hollywood clones.

Two of his most acclaimed films were made in America,. My Dinner With Andre was virtually a two-hander, the simple but riveting record of a dinner-time conversation between a sophisticated theatre director and his mousy stay-at-home friend. And, at the end of 1994, he made what was to be his swan song, Vanya on 42nd Street: Uncle Vanya filmed as a "plain clothes" rehearsal in an empty New York playhouse, with art and life imperceptibly mingling. Many critics thought it one of the best movies of last year. It was a worthy film with which to make his final exit.