Philippe Labro is dead

The media man, journalist and writer, also directed half a dozen films that will have marked French cinema from the 1970s.

It was the very definition of jack-of-all-trades. Philippe Labro is dead. Writer, journalist, lyricist, and media man, he died at the age of 88, as RTL announced on Wednesday, where he was one of the pillars for many years.

But beyond radio, TV and even words, Philippe Labro will have marked the French cinema of the 1970s and 1980s with its imprint with a handful of tense films, inspired by American cinema.

It was at the end of the 1960s that he went behind the camera, carried by a passion for cinema that he nourished during his young years in the United States. He will make seven feature films, mostly black, nervous, urban, which are part of the vein of movie black French.

First try: Anything can happen (1969), existential variation on fate and pretense. But it’s with Without apparent mobile (1971), a breathless thriller with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Senta Berger, that he imposes his style, a precise staging and a dry narration, mixed with a certain moral ambiguity. The film will bring together more than 1 million spectators in theaters.

SO Philippe Labro chain with The heir (1973), a political thriller worn by Jean-Paul Belmondo as an heir trapped in an industrial empire, his biggest success with 2 million admissions. The filmmaker will still turn Bebel three years later, in Alpaguemaking the star a bonus hunter.

The director will then sign Crime (1983) with Claude Brasseur, or Right bank, shore LEFT (1984), a poisonous plunge behind the scenes of power and justice, with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye and a young Carole Bouquet, who will win a César appointment of the best actress in a supporting role.

Philippe Labro Made from films that stick to the time, capture a certain elegance of disenchantment.

Thus, if he stopped cinema at the end of the 80s, it was undoubtedly that the French society he liked to scrutinize had changed his face. He then returned to his first love: books (The foreign studentInterallié Prix 1986; Fifteen1992), the songs (he wrote for Johnny Hallyday), and of course the media, including RTL, where he was director of the programs between 1985 and 2000.