In the 1950s Jean Delannoy was the French film director whom the upstart talent of the Nouvelle Vague most liked to bait and wound.

François Truffaut, the future director of Jules et Jim, told the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma that he had sat through Delannoy’s 1954 Jean Gabin drama Chiens perdus sans collier three times, in order to learn how not direct.

His sins, in Truffaut’s eyes, included the academic precision of his images, the coolness of his temperament — both undoubted characteristics — and something much harder to prove: insincerity.

Even Delannoy’s background was used against him. Jean-Luc Godard, another Cahiers firebrand, mocked the director for arriving at his film studios with briefcase in hand: “You would have sworn he was going into an insurance office.” In the 1920s Delannoy had worked as a bank clerk.

Such slights did nothing to halt his productivity, and, ironically, Delannoy survived long enough to outlive several of his young tormentors. He made his first feature, Paris-Deauville, in 1934; he made his last, Marie de Nazareth in 1995, aged a mere 87. In between came some impersonal and dull films, like Notre Dame de Paris (1957) and other historical dramas made for the crowds.

But Delannoy was also the director of L’Eternel retour (1943), of La Symphonie pastorale (1946), Les Jeux sont faits (1947), and Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950) — films sufficiently serious and strikingly photographed to earn him genuine stature, along with numerous film festival prizes.

La Symphonie pastorale, a chillingly beautiful adaptation of André Gide’s novel about a Protestant pastor (Pierre Blanchar) who eventually falls in love with the blind girl whom he adopted as a child, took home the top prize at the inaugural Cannes Film Festival. For several years after, the severely beautiful Michèle Morgan, picked as Cannes’ Best Actress, became Delannoy’s regular heroine.

Born in 1908 in Noisy-le-Sec, near Paris, Delannoy was schooled in the old-fashioned way, inching through the industry a step at a time. In the late 1920s, lured by his sister Henriette, a silent-film actress, he had entered cinema as an actor but switched to editing in the early 1930s, learning his trade at Paramount’s Paris studios before trying his hand at directing shorts. None of his Cahiers du Cinéma critics could claim that degree of training.

At his peak Delannoy frequently worked with such leading writers as Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre: writers perhaps comforted by the lack of ego in Delannoy’s shooting style. Without scripts of substance and subtlety Delannoy’s unfussy direction could in truth be as bureaucratic as Godard implied. But with the right material, the crisply poised scenes allowed emotional and moral conflicts to rise up and tease the audience’s mind.

Pontcarral (1942), a Napoleonic story, provided an early example; discreet echoes of France’s plight during the Occupation also helped the film’s success. Delannoy’s cool gaze seemed particularly appropriate to Cocteau’s updated Tristan and Isolde story, L’Eternel retour, filled with splendours chilly and bizarre, and the sculpted glory of Jean Marais.

Dieu a besoin des hommes, which shared the main prize at the 1950 Venice Film Festival, offset its weight of portentous talk with the unforced eloquence of its bleak Brittany landscapes: an ideal setting for airing moral quandaries.

In the 1950s Delannoy’s work ranged widely in material. In several projects he tussled for film rights with the austere genius of Robert Bresson, holding on to Madame de la Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves, eventually made in 1960, but losing Georges Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de campagne. For other assignments he lowered his ambitions. “How can one progress if one does not change one’s genre?” he once said, though the progress may be hard to spot in Delannoy’s placid historical melodramas, or his TV biographical dramas in the 1980s.

His artistic variability had little effect on his industry standing, however. In 1975 he was appointed chairman of the film school Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques; in 1986 he received an honorary César award.

This year Michèle Morgan was among the industry figures who joined him at his home in Bueil, Normandy, to celebrate his centenary.

Jean Delannoy, film director, was born on January 12, 1908. He died on June 19, 2008, aged 100.