Philippe Claude Alex de Broca de Ferrussac (15 March 1933 – 26 November 2004) was a French film director.
He directed 30 full-length feature films, including the highly successful That Man from Rio (L'Homme de Rio), The Man from Acapulco (Le Magnifique) and On Guard (Le Bossu). His works include historical, romantic epics such as Chouans! and King of Hearts (Le Roi de cœur), as well as comedies with a charismatic, breezy hero ready to embark upon any adventure which comes his way, so long as it means escaping everyday modern life: Practice Makes Perfect (Le Cavaleur), The Devil by the Tail (Le Diable par la queue), The African (L'Africain). He had links with the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom he made six films, as well as with Jean-Pierre Cassel, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort.
Philippe de Broca was born on 15 March 1933 in Paris. He was the son of a cinema set designer and the grandson of a well-known painter, Alexis de Broca. He studied at the Paris Photography and Cinematography School (école Vaugirard), graduating in 1953. He carried out his military service with the French Army's service cinématographique des armées (army film service) in Germany and then in Algeria, directing or acting as head cameraman on short films. Greatly affected by the war he witnessed in Algeria, he vowed to show life in its best light in his future films "because laughter is the best defence against upsets in life". After his discharge from the military, he set off on a journey taking in the length of Africa in Berliet trucks before returning to Paris.
He began working as an intern with Henri Decoin, before finding assistant positions with Claude Chabrol: Bitter Reunion (Le Beau Serge), The Cousins (Les Cousins), Web of Passion (À Double Tour), François Truffaut: The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups) and Pierre Schoendoerffer: Ramuntcho. In 1959, Claude Chabrol produced de Broca's first film for him, The Love Game (Les jeux de l'amour) with Jean-Pierre Cassel. De Broca went on to work with Cassel again in The Joker (Le Farceur, 1960), Five Day Lover (L'Amant de cinq jours, 1961), and Male Companion (Un Monsieur de Compagnie, 1964).
Drama
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
8.01959
Drama · Crime
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
7.51960
Comedy · Romance
A writer of pulpy book series in which he's the hero and his beautiful English roommate is the love interest attempts to finish his new book in time at the publisher's demand.
7.01973
Adventure · Action
French military man Adrien Dufourquet gets an eight-day furlough to visit his fiancée, Agnès. But when he arrives in Paris, he learns that her late father's partner, museum curator Professor Catalan, has just been kidnapped by a group of Amazon tribesmen who have also stolen a priceless statue from the museum. Adrien and Agnès pursue the kidnappers to Brazil, where they learn that the statue is the key to a hidden Amazon treasure.
7.31964
Adventure · Action
France, 17th century, during the reign of Louis XIII. When a dear friend, the Duke of Nevers, is treacherously assassinated by a powerful relative, a skilled swordsman, the noble Henri de Lagardère, seeks his rightful vengeance as he tries to protect the innocent life of the duke's last heir.
6.71997
Adventure · Comedy
In the 18th century, Louis de Bourguignon is working with the Malichot's gang, but their ways are too 'unethical' for him. He creates his own band, acting under the name of Cartouche, making audacious robberies of the rich people, and even distributing the takings with the poor. Thus, cartouche attracts the people's sympathies, Venus's love, and hate from the Police and Malichot... Cartouche can escape all the traps they set at him - except the entrapments of love. Eventually, he will be saved by a woman, at her own cost.
6.31962
Drama
1920. Jean Rezeau and his elder brother were living happily in their family estate in Brittany, until the death of their grandmother. The return of their mother, a worthy descendant of fairytales' witches, brings an all new atmosphere to their home.
6.42004
Comedy · Crime
Victor Vautier is incorrigible: he's in constant motion, working several cons at once, using different names and changing disguises. He's charming and outrageous, incapable of uttering a sentence that isn't embellished or an outright lie. His life goal is to make enough money to build a sea wall to protect Mont-Saint-Michel. Charlotte, a parole officer, shows up: she's young and seems taken in by Victor. He discovers she lives above the Senlus Museum, where her parents are the curators. With two pals he decides to steal a priceless El Greco triptych and then ransom it back to the cultural ministry. What will Charlotte do when she realizes he's used her to make a fortune?
6.21975
Comedy
When Lise's car bumps Antoine's bike, they recognize each other from a brief fling 20 years before while at the Sorbonne. He's now a professor of Greek; she's loathe to tell him she's a police inspector. A call interrupts their first dinner date: a Deputy of the National Assembly has been murdered. She has a suspect, another Deputy, and must track him while deflecting Antoine's eye from her vocation. All roads in the inquiry lead to Christine Vallier, the dead Deputy's mistress, a beguiling 22-year-old whose mother ran the Assembly's snack bar. When more deputies die and Antoine learns Lise's identity, she must act quickly solve the crime and save her future.
5.91978
Drama
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
8.01959
Drama · Crime
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
7.51960
Comedy · Romance
A writer of pulpy book series in which he's the hero and his beautiful English roommate is the love interest attempts to finish his new book in time at the publisher's demand.
7.01973
Adventure · Action
French military man Adrien Dufourquet gets an eight-day furlough to visit his fiancée, Agnès. But when he arrives in Paris, he learns that her late father's partner, museum curator Professor Catalan, has just been kidnapped by a group of Amazon tribesmen who have also stolen a priceless statue from the museum. Adrien and Agnès pursue the kidnappers to Brazil, where they learn that the statue is the key to a hidden Amazon treasure.
7.31964
Adventure · Action
France, 17th century, during the reign of Louis XIII. When a dear friend, the Duke of Nevers, is treacherously assassinated by a powerful relative, a skilled swordsman, the noble Henri de Lagardère, seeks his rightful vengeance as he tries to protect the innocent life of the duke's last heir.
6.71997
Adventure · Comedy
In the 18th century, Louis de Bourguignon is working with the Malichot's gang, but their ways are too 'unethical' for him. He creates his own band, acting under the name of Cartouche, making audacious robberies of the rich people, and even distributing the takings with the poor. Thus, cartouche attracts the people's sympathies, Venus's love, and hate from the Police and Malichot... Cartouche can escape all the traps they set at him - except the entrapments of love. Eventually, he will be saved by a woman, at her own cost.
6.31962
Comedy · Adventure
A millionaire realizes he really wants to live after he has hired an assassin to kill him.
7.01965
Drama
1920. Jean Rezeau and his elder brother were living happily in their family estate in Brittany, until the death of their grandmother. The return of their mother, a worthy descendant of fairytales' witches, brings an all new atmosphere to their home.
6.42004
Comedy · Crime
Victor Vautier is incorrigible: he's in constant motion, working several cons at once, using different names and changing disguises. He's charming and outrageous, incapable of uttering a sentence that isn't embellished or an outright lie. His life goal is to make enough money to build a sea wall to protect Mont-Saint-Michel. Charlotte, a parole officer, shows up: she's young and seems taken in by Victor. He discovers she lives above the Senlus Museum, where her parents are the curators. With two pals he decides to steal a priceless El Greco triptych and then ransom it back to the cultural ministry. What will Charlotte do when she realizes he's used her to make a fortune?
6.21975
Drama
After long absence, a man returns to his hometown only to find his best friend has become an alcoholic.
6.91959
Comedy
When Lise's car bumps Antoine's bike, they recognize each other from a brief fling 20 years before while at the Sorbonne. He's now a professor of Greek; she's loathe to tell him she's a police inspector. A call interrupts their first dinner date: a Deputy of the National Assembly has been murdered. She has a suspect, another Deputy, and must track him while deflecting Antoine's eye from her vocation. All roads in the inquiry lead to Christine Vallier, the dead Deputy's mistress, a beguiling 22-year-old whose mother ran the Assembly's snack bar. When more deputies die and Antoine learns Lise's identity, she must act quickly solve the crime and save her future.
5.91978
Comedy · Drama
An ornithologist mistaken for an explosives expert is sent alone into a small French town during WWI to investigate a garbled report from the resistance about a bomb which the departing Germans have set to blow up a weapons cache.
7.01966
Comedy
Antoine, a professor of Greek, and Lise, a police inspector, honeymoon in Greece. There they meet a young couple, Charles, an archaeologist, and Agnes, a dishy flirt. Charles unearths the lovely buttocks of a classical statue and is determined to donate it to the Louvre. Agnes wants to sell it and gets a handsome local sailor to take it for an appraisal. When the sailor is murdered, the police suspect Charles and arrest Antoine as his accomplice. Lise swings into action, but before she can clear the men, Agnes springs them from jail, and now Lise must help them elude the police, find the real murderer, and recover the statue fragment. More art goes missing. What is the statue's secret?
6.21980
Comedy · Adventure
Charlotte flies to East Africa to build a tourist center near Lake Williams where the pygmies live. Here she meets her husband Victor, a devoted conservationist who left her three years ago to live in the jungle. Can you imagine his enthusiasm when she arrives at the conclusion that the ideal place to build this holiday resort is his kitchen garden?
6.31983
Fantasy · Comedy
Sheherazade has been married to a ruler who wants many wives, but only one at a time. Consequently, as soon as he has bedded them, he has them put to death. In most retellings, the girl staves off this unfortunate conclusion by putting off the connubial event for a thousand and one nights, telling irresistible stories instead. In this one, she gets hold of a magic lamp.
5.21990
Drama · History
Directed by Philippe de Broca, the film recounts a bloody episode of the French Revolution. 1793, the Terror . In Vendée and in Bretagne, the chouans are revolting against the young Republic and fight for the monarchy restauration. The civil war divides also the family of the Count Savinien de Kerfadec, a liberal and generous noble and a flying machines inventor.
5.81988
Comedy
In this comedy, a run-down hotel drums up customers by sabotaging passing cars. The stuck motorists are then obliged to stay. Unfortunately, one of the sabotaged cars belongs to a bank robber. The hotel staff wants the robber out, but they also want to keep his ill-gotten money.
6.11969
Comedy
A discontented concert pianist causes all sorts of heartbreak with his egotistical and womanizing antics, and all the people in his life attempt to force him to grow up in this French comedy/drama.
5.71979
Comedy · Drama
A collection of sketches that tells the story of prostitution through the ages.
5.01967
Comedy
A light French comedy of 5 segments.
5.61963
Adventure · Comedy
On an observatory set high on a mountain, astronomers make a stunning discovery somewhere out in the galaxy. A flying object in the depths of the cosmos is showing signs of life, emitting an intelligent signal. The UFO has just landed on Earth somewhere in the midst of a rainforest. Margot, the enthusiastic young woman heading up the research team, decides to go to the spot and check out this phenomenon. Meanwhile Edouard, our hero, studies the flora and fauna of the tree tops in the rainforest. He perches on an enormous net that stretches over the still pure, unadulterated forest that spreads out beneath him. He discovers a naked little twelve-year old girl seated on the net. He covers her with a broad banana leaf and asks where she comes from. She quickly replies, in perfect French 'from another world'.
4.42000
Comedy · Romance
Marie, a young provincial girl, is seduced by an American billionaire. She agrees to stay with him if he moves her village to New York.
5.81970
Romance · Comedy
Hubert Durieux is a banker in a small French town who is struggling to keep up with the demands of all the women in his life. Just when things couldn’t get any worse, his precious white Citroën is stolen under his eyes by a beautiful gypsy girl, Mona.
4.41986
Comedy · Drama
North Africa, December 1942. Valentin, a professional gardener ruined by the bombings of 1940, has fled to Tunis, where he traffics stolen goods, transporting them from Libya to Tunisia on an old boat.
5.21971
Comedy
Seven directors each dramatize one of the seven deadly sins in a short film. In "Anger," a domestic argument over a fly in the Sunday soup escalates into nuclear war. In "Sloth," a movie star would rather pay someone to tie his shoe than bend over to do it himself, and he can't be bothered to accept a starlet's sexual favors. In "Gluttony," a peasant family on its way to the funeral of a relative who died from indigestion stops regularly to eat and drink en route, arriving in time to eat some more. In "Greed," a high-class prostitute refunds the price of a cadet's lottery ticket. In "Pride," an unfaithful wife finds reason to reform. And so on through lust and envy.
5.91962
Comedy · Drama
Claire is a young mother and married to Georges, but she is also having an affair with bachelor Antoine, who is being kept by her good friend Madeleine, a wealthy fashion designer. But the meetings at Antoine's apartment, five afternoons a week, come to a halt when their partners learn the truth.
6.41961
Comedy
Julie asks Jean-Luc Farlot, authorized signatory of a big European bank to help her disguise a murder as an accident.
4.51977
Comedy
A young man who lives on women meets his match in the young wife of a rich industrialist. Their affair is doomed by her taste for luxury and his dislike of her coolness.
5.01961
Talk
6.81982
Talk
5.71987
Talk · News
Le Grand Échiquier is a French variety television program created and presented by Jacques Chancel. It aired at 8:30 pm on the first channel of the ORTF from January 12, 1972 to July 12, 1972, then on the second color channel of the ORTF from September 1972 to December 1974, and finally on Antenne 2 from January 1975 to December 21, 1989. The program returned to France 2 on December 20, 2018 and is hosted by Anne-Sophie Lapix.
8.01972
Documentary · Family
8.71956
Talk
Marcello Mastroianni, Isabelle Adjani, Alain Delon, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen... the biggest stars in cinema were welcomed by Christian Defaye on his show Spécial cinéma. Between intimate confessions from actors and immersion in the world of the greatest filmmakers, Christian Defaye took viewers on a journey into the fascinating world of cinema for nearly thirty years.
9.51974
Talk
A talk show presented by Michel Drucker
6.01975
Documentary
5.01978