Gilles Grangier

Biography: life and films

One of the most successful of France's mainstream film directors in the 1950s and '60s, Gilles Grangier had a prolific career and worked with some of French cinema's biggest names - Fernandel, Bourvil, Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Daniel Gélin, Martine Carole, Lino Ventura, and many others. In a career that spans forty years he made over sixty films for cinema and television and had some notable box office hits. Born in Paris on 5th May 1911, Grangier first made his way into cinema by the backdoor, as a lowly film extra in the early 1930s. He appeared in a number of films around this time, including Louis Gasnier's Fédora (1934) and Robert Boudrioz's L'Homme à l'oreille cassée (1934), before he graduated to the post of assistant production manager (on Anatole Litvak's Mayerling). He then worked as an assistant director on several films, including Georges Lacombe's Le Coeur dispose (1936), Richard Pottier's Les Secrets de la Mer Rouge (1937), Sacha Guitry's Désiré (1938) and René Pujol's Les Gangsters du château d'If (1939).

It was the comic actor Noël-Noël who got Gilles Grangier his first job as a director, on the comedy Adémaï bandit d'honneur (1943). This film was such a hit with the public that Grangier had no difficulty finding work as a director afterwards. He teamed up with the popular singer-actor Georges Guétary on Le Cavalier noir (1945) and Trente et quarante (1946), and then worked for the first time with the comedy giant Fernandel on L'Aventure de Cabassou (1946). For the first decade of his directing career, Grangier's speciality was comedy, occasionally musical-comedy, but he did make a few excursions into more serious territory, such as the drama Danger de mort (1947) and thriller Au p'tit zouave (1949). Par la fenêtre (1948) was the first of several successful collaborations with the popular comic actor Bourvil. He began his long and fruitful association with Jean Gabin on La Vierge du Rhin (1953) - the two men worked together on eleven subsequent films.

From the mid-1950s, Gilles Grangier specialised in noir thrillers, cashing in on the sudden popularity of the policier genre after the success of Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954). He contributed several notable examples of the genre, with many featuring Jean Gabin - these include: Gas-oil (1955), Le Rouge est mis (1957), Le Désordre et la nuit (1958), 125, rue Montmartre (1959) and Le Cave se rebiffe (1961). Although Grangier was at his most inspired in the thriller genre, he continued to have great success in the comedy line, particularly when he paired some great comic performers: Bourvil and Louis de Funès in Poisson d'avril (1954), Bourvil and Fernandel in La Cuisine au beurre (1963) and Fernandel and Jean Gabin in L'Âge ingrat (1964). La Cuisine au beurre was Grangier's most successful film - it attracted an audience of 6.4 million in France and is still one of his most popular films. Grangier had a close friendship with the prolific screenwriter Michel Audiard, who worked on many of his films - their finest collaboration being the superb Georges Simenon adaptation (starring Gabin) Le Sang à la tête (1956).

Towards the late 1960s, Gilles Grangier's inspiration was starting to fail him, as is apparent in the last films he worked on with Fernandel and Gabin - L'Homme à la Buick (1968) and Sous le signe du taureau (1969). His screen career virtually over by the 1970s, Grangier switched to television and was busily occupied for the next decade on television series such as Les Mohicans de Paris (1973-5) and TV movies like Jean-Sans-Terre (1980). His final work for the cinema was the Rumanian film Wilhelm Cuceritorul (1982). He retired from directing in 1985 and died in hospital in Suresnes, France, on 27th April 1996, just a few days before his 85th birthday.

Filmography

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