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Sex, death and growing upLouis Malle's films still pack a punchBy Todd Leopold  ON CNN TV Watch "Showbiz Tonight" on CNN Headline News at 7 p.m. ET weekdays.
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- An intellectual adolescent with sex and mother issues -- and his childlike mother, who has issues of her own. A 12-year-old girl growing up in a brothel, losing her innocence all too quickly. An 18-year-old French man-boy who works for the Germans during World War II. A student who becomes friends with a Jewish boy during World War II, and worries if he'll give away the boy's secret. Has anyone ever examined the thorny issues of growing up, of children trapped in an adult world and adults stuck with their childlike fears, better than Louis Malle? The French director, who died in 1995, created bittersweet films that stay in the memory long after viewing: "Murmur of the Heart," "Pretty Baby," "Lacombe, Lucien," "Au Revoir, Les Enfants," described (respectively) above, as well as "Atlantic City," "My Dinner With Andre" and "Vanya on 42nd Street." Many of these films are told through a child's eyes, with an adult's distance and wistfulness. Adolescence is a minefield of secrets: secret longings, secret shames, secrets not old enough to know. Forget John Hughes. Malle's heroes have bigger problems than parents forgetting a 16th birthday or wondering if the popular guy will ask you out. In "Les Enfants," which lost the Oscar for best foreign-language film to "Babette's Feast," revealing the Jewish boy's secret could lead to a concentration camp. Three Malle films -- "Les Enfants," "Murmur" and "Lacombe, Lucien" -- are being released by Criterion in a DVD box set Tuesday, with pristine transfers and a disc of bonus material. Eye on Entertainment goes back. Eye-openerMalle's career began at roughly the same time as the leaders of the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, but his early films were much more conventional than those of his colleagues. It wasn't until 1971's "Murmur," the tale of a boy's coming-of-age and the resultant bedding of his mother, that Malle came into his own. "Lacombe, Lucien," which came out in 1974, follows an aimless man who attempts to join the French Resistance in the last years of World War II. Having failed, he offers himself to the Germans, supplying them with information until meeting the daughter of a Jewish tailor. The relationship throws his loyalties into doubt. And then there's "Au Revoir, Les Enfants," perhaps Malle's most autobiographical film. In it, a Catholic boarding school takes in three Jewish students to hide them from the Nazis. One of the students, Jean Bonnet, becomes friends with one of the school's top pupils, Julien Quintin. But friendship also leads to rivalry and secrets, and that makes Bonnet's life -- and the lives of his Jewish compatriots -- all the more fragile. Malle didn't always succeed. An American film, "Alamo Bay," with Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, was disappointing; his adaptation of Josephine Hart's novel "Damage" was greeted with wildly differing reviews. David Thomson, in his "New Biographical Dictionary of Film," calls him "a minor figure with pretensions to mastery." But then there is the glance in "Au Revoir," a searing moment more powerful than any number of Michael Bay explosions, and "mastery" is a word that comes to mind. "3 Films by Louis Malle" comes out on DVD Tuesday. On screenOn the tubeSound wavesPaging readersVideo center
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