Charles Denner

 Acting Career

In 1955, director Yves Allégret offered Denner a small role in La Meilleure part (The Best Part), thus introducing him for the first time to cinema audiences. Two years later, in 1957, he secured another secondary role in Louis Malle’s legendary Elevator to the Gallows, next to Jeanne Moreau, a co-performer of his from the days of the TNP; however, it was not until 1963 that Denner was offered his first leading role by Claude Chabrol in Landru, a film considered by many as his greatest on-screen performance. Despite his growing recognition on the big screen, the stage remained his true passion and the place where he gave his most memorable performances in plays like Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin (Scapin’s Schemings) and Brecht’s Drums in the Night.

Charles concentrated on the stage while Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and other film-makers revolutionized French cinema at the time.  When Denner returned it was in a star role – and with a bald head and a full beard – as Landru (1962), the infamous wife- poisoner, killing off such vieille vague stars as Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan: this was one of Chabrol’s early studies of murder and adultery among the bourgeoisie, the whole expected to be a winning combination (Francoise Sagan worked on the screenplay) – which Chabrol needed, after some undeserved flops, but it was perhaps too full-frontal for public acceptance and certainly too misogynist.

Denner had another whale of a role in Alain Jessua’s witty and stylish La Vie a l’envers (1964), as a seemingly cheerful clerk in a Paris estate agent’s office who turns his back on the world. It was easily Jessua’s best film and certainly there is no film in which Denner delves into himself so deeply – but it is not necessarily his best film, for there were many very good ones to come. Taking them chronologically and with regard to those seen outside France, there are Constantin Costa-Gavras’s first feature, Compartiment Tueurs (1964), an all-star (Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Trintignant) murder mystery, with Denner as one of the dead girl’s lovers, a sarcastic cop-hater; Chabrol’s Marie-Chantal contre le Dr Kah (1965), one of the “commercial” films this director made to restore his bankability; Claude Berri’s first feature, the autobiographical Le Vieil homme et l’enfant (1966), as the father of the small Jewish boy who makes a friend of a gruff country gentile (Michel Simon); and Malle’s turn-of- the-century Le Voleur (1967), with Belmondo as one of the inevitably dreamy French crook and Denner as an ageing crime tsar.

Exploring The People, Places and History of All Things Denner

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