French film director who attracted big stars and box-office success but was disdained by the Nouvelle Vague
Denys de La Patellière, who has died aged 92, was of the generation of French film directors described with ironic contempt by François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other critics turned Nouvelle Vague directors as representing le cinéma de papa. But De La Patellière had several huge box-office hits in France in the 1950s and 60s, featuring some of the biggest internationally known French stars of the period such as Lino Ventura, Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Mercier, Pierre Fresnay, Bernard Blier and, above all, Jean Gabin, whom he directed in six films.
"I was a commercial director, which for me is not a pejorative word," De La Patellière recalled. "I never had the ambition to become an auteur, but to make entertaining films that pleased general audiences." In a way, his first film, Les Aristocrates (1955), could be seen as a prescient reflection of the approaching aesthetic generation gap. It tells of an ageing French nobleman (Fresnay), locked into the style and habits of the past, coming into bitter conflict with his grown-up children, who try to push him into adapting to their way of life. Fresnay is a moving figure as the almost pathetically outmoded marquis, not a character with whom the director would have identified.
Born in Nantes, he was the son of a military officer. He was training to be a professional soldier at the military academy of Saint-Cyr, in Brittany, when the second world war broke out. De La Patellière then joined the Free French Forces, fighting in North Africa, the setting for his most celebrated film, Un Taxi pour Tobrouk (Taxi for Tobruk, 1961). Two of De La Patellière's brothers were killed fighting forthe resistance.
Immediately after the war, De La Patellière started working in films, first as an editor on newsreels, then as assistant director. He co-wrote Le Défroqué (The Unfrocked One, 1954), a powerful drama of faith, starring Fresnay in the title role, which led to The Aristocrats. This was followed by well-made melodramas, driven mainly by superb performances. Among them were Le Salaire du Péché (The Wages of Sin, 1956), with Jean-Claude Pascal intent on killing his wife (Darrieux) in order to live with an attractive nurse (Jeanne Moreau); the rather risqué Les Oeufs de l'Autruche (The Ostrich Has Two Eggs, 1957), in which an egotistical father (Fresnay) discovers that one of his sons is gay and another is supported by a Japanese countess; and Retour de Manivelle (1957), a gripping film noir, based on the novel There's Always a Price Tag by James Hadley Chase, and starring Michèle Morgan, Daniel Gélin and Mercier.
Les Grandes Familles (The Possessors, 1958), with its solid storytelling virtues and the imposing presence of Gabin, was De La Patellière's widest release abroad. Gabin plays the patriarch of a wealthy family with controlling interests in banking, the press and the arts, who has doubts about the fitness of his son (Jean Desailly) to succeed him, while trying to do down his rivals.
The portly 54-year-old Gabin, who had made his reputation playing social outcasts and working-class heroes in classic films by Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir, had now settled for workmanlike directors such as De La Patellière, Gilles Grangier and Henri Verneuil, who gave him free rein as a forceful bourgeois paterfamilias, allowing him at least one of his trademark angry outbursts.
Du Rififi à Paname (The Upper Hand/Rififi in Paris, 1966) paired Gabin with George Raft, in the pits of his career, as rival gangsters and, in a more comic vein, Le Tatoué (The Tattooed One, 1968) cast Gabin as an irascible, impoverished aristocrat who has an original Modigliani tattooed on his back.
Taxi for Tobruk, a witty, taut and exciting action yarn, which told of the trek across the Libyan desert of four French soldiers and their German prisoner during the second world war, gave Ventura, Hardy Krüger and Charles Aznavour a chance to shine.
In 1965, De La Patellière was given the task of directing a large-scale international epic, La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo (Marco the Magnificent), with Horst Buchholz as Marco Polo and an impressive cast that included Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Orson Welles and Elsa Martinelli. Filmed in CinemaScope, mainly in Yugoslavia, it had spectacular battle scenes and imposing landscapes, but came lumbering in at the tail end of the extravagant 60s genre.
When large-screen success began to elude him, he turned to television, directing an excellent version of The Count of Monte Cristo in 1979 and episodes of Maigret.
De La Patellière, who was married to Florence Renard, is survived by three children, Fabrice, Alexandre and Julie.
• Denys Dubois de La Patellière, film and television director, born 8 March 1921; died 21 July 2013