Philippe de Broca

French director Philippe de Broca began as a documentary filmmaker in Africa, developing a taste for wanderlust and exotic locales that would later manifest itself in his feature films. de Broca worked as an assistant for several of the most prominent French nouvelle vague directors of the 1950s (he appears on-camera in Godard's Breathless [1959]), making his own directorial debut with the improvisational The Love Game. He then switched from the New Wave to box office-conscious comedy/adventure films, many of these starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Though active into the 1990s, Broca's popularity crested in the 1960s with such international hits as That Man from Rio (1964) and Up to His Ears (1965). Philippe de Broca is best known to several decades' worth of college-age filmgoers for his sometimes whimsical, sometimes rollicking 1966 antiwar film King of Hearts.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide