Philippe de Broca

Philippe de Broca (born March 15, 1933, Paris, France—died November 25, 2004, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French film director best known for his eccentric, irreverent comedies, made with enthusiasm and technical skill.

After graduation from the Paris Technical School of Photography and Cinematography, Broca began his film career as a cameraman on a documentary shot in Africa. He worked for a time as an assistant to directors Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Henri Decoin, and Georges Lacombe—who were rebelling against the classically and carefully written studio scripts that were then so popular in the French cinema.

Although Broca’s early association with New Wave directors had an influence on him, he verged from them and put his energies and technical skills into comedies or humorous depictions of nonconformist characters and their confused situations. Some of his early films starred Jean-Pierre Cassel as a good-natured lover—in Les Jeux de l’amour (1960; The Love Game), Le Farceur (1961; The Joker), and L’Amant de cinq jours (1961; The Five Day Lover)—and the characterization was reprised in Le Cavaleur (1978; Practice Makes Perfect). Perhaps his most popular early films were L’Homme de Rio (1963; That Man from Rio), a spoof of espionage movies, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Le Roi de coeur (1966; The King of Hearts), an antiwar film in which the inmates of an asylum take over a deserted village during wartime and elect a humble British soldier (played by Alan Bates) their king; The King of Hearts enjoyed long popularity as a cult film. His movies in the 1970s and ’80s generally were less critically acclaimed. Broca, who wrote or cowrote most of his film scripts, continued to work into the 21st century.