Malle in Madison

Mike Wilmington engages celebrated French filmmaker Louis Malle in a wide-ranging interview on the eve of the Madison premiere of his latest triumph, Au Revoir les Enfants, at the Majestic Theatre. "Madison is supposedly a good town for cinema, huh?" begins Malle. "I know because I remember My Dinner With Andre ran there forever. It really put that city on the map for me." Wilmington asks Malle about the moral questions raised by all his American films at "a time of great conservatism in American movies, where moral issues are trivialized." Malle: "I'm not going to get into easy politics, but [the Reagan years] corresponded to a mood in American culture that was a mixture of extreme conservatism and a return to older values.... That's when movies became 'concepts.' You could argue that the years between '82 and '86 were the worst years, in terms of quality, in history." Malle goes on to make three more movies, including Vanya on 42nd Street, before his death in 1995. Wilmington became a critic for The Chicago Tribune and is now a freelance film writer; his DVD reviews appear on TheDailyPage.com.