Kenneth Rive, who has died aged 84, taught British audiences to love foreign language films, and was a leading influence in the development of post-war arthouse cinema.
As a managing director of the distributors, Gala Films, Rive showed almost all the work of Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman; he bought Eric Rohmer's Ma Nuit Chez Maude and Claire's Knee; Mai Zetterling's Night Games; and Vittorio de Sica's The Two Women, which introduced Sophia Loren to Britain. In addition, he bought the films of Claude Chabrol, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa.
Rive counted many directors as friends. He met Franois Truffaut, the first of his discoveries from the French nouvelle vague, just after the shooting of Truffaut's feature debut The 400 Blows: "I saw a rough-cut and it made a deep impression on me," Rive recalled. He snapped up the distribution rights to the film, which went on to win Truffaut a best director award at Cannes in 1959.
Although the director held "impecunious middlemen" (that is, film distributors) in contempt, he made an exception for Rive, and the two became close friends. Rive went on to handle almost all of Truffaut's films - "even the ones I didn't like". Jules et Jim, Truffaut's greatest success in Britain, played in London for a year.
Since many of Rive's acquisitions ran into trouble with the British film censors, he had to get to know his directors, in order to negotiate cuts. When the censors were giving trouble over Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, he went to see Cocteau in Paris: "When I got there, I thought I had the wrong address. It was a dirty old staircase; there was a pram in the hall, and the smell of cats was overpowering. When I got to the top, there he was with Jean Marais, both of them with cats on their shoulders and cats running around everywhere. He had some skin infection he'd picked up from them."
Bergman, whose films Rive acquired as he sensed he was "a chap on the way up", was another bizarre character. He refused to make cuts to his films, and never came to his own premieres, always disappearing at the last moment: "He had terrible trouble with his bowels, though," Rive reflected. "Perhaps that's why. He was always being taken short somewhere." But there were more important problems faced by Rive, who often had an uphill struggle selling subtitled films to cinema audiences in Britain. London, Manchester and Birmingham accepted them; indeed, in certain circles, as he recalled, "if you hadn't seen the latest Truffaut, you hadn't arrived".
It was a very different matter elsewhere. Liverpool "hated" them. Cardiff was "even worse": put Truffaut's name outside a cinema in Cardiff, Rive observed, "and they think it's a kind of pancake".
Kenneth Rive was born at Canonbury, north London, on July 26 1918, the son of a film cameraman who did much of his work in Germany. Kenneth consequently spent a good deal of his early life there. He became a child star in German movies of the 1920s - he later described himself as "Freddie Bartholomew, German style" - playing opposite Conrad Veidt in Rasputin, with Anton Walbrook in The Gypsy Baron and appearing in Wilhelm Dieterle's Behind the Altar, among other films.
When his voice broke, he returned to Britain as a teenage compere for a Hughie Green road show. After the war, during which he worked in British Intelligence, Rive became a projectionist at a cinema in Tottenham Court Road, London; he later bought the cinema, wanting to exhibit films of his own choice.
His career as a distributor began in the 1950s when he founded Gala Films. On a visit to Moscow in 1952, he signed an agreement by which he became the Soviet Union's sole distributing agent in Britain under a barter arrangement. He returned to Britain with The Big Top, The Fall of Berlin and Ballerina, which gave English audiences their first glimpse of the Bolshoi. He went on to buy 67 Russian films, though the Russians showed little reciprocal interest in British films, restricting their orders to such ideologically improving fare as Oliver Twist.
Rive owned and ran the Berkeley and Continentale cinemas in Tottenham Court Road in the 1950s, where the cognoscenti were able to watch the best of foreign films. He also established a network of small, specialised cinemas in British provincial towns and cities; in 1965 he and Leslie Grade teamed up to form Grade Rive, a cinema circuit for exhibiting specialised British and foreign films. In the same year, he concluded a deal with the British Film Institute, guaranteeing them 16 mm prints of all the films on his books, so that they could be hired out, at low cost, to film societies.
But times became difficult for small film distributors as the major American companies began to muscle in on the foreign film market, outbidding for some of the more notable films. Rive, however, still had his successes, for example with Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, as well as Truffaut's The Last Metro.
Rive had sold his circuit of cinemas in the late 1970s to concentrate on distribution and, with such an impressive back catalogue, his business continued to thrive. At the end of the 1980s Gala took its library to Cannon Films, of which Rive became a director, taking charge of both distribution and TV sales, for which he achieved an income of more than £13 million in two years. When Cannon collapsed, Rive retrieved his library and continued to trade as Gala Film Distributors. At the time of his death, he was working on plans to diversify into DVDs.
Rive received many awards, including two from the French government for services to French culture. He served as president of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, and as Chief Barker for the Variety Club.
Kenneth Rive's wife Anne, whom he met during the war, died six years ago; they had four children. Having declared: "It is my intent, God willing, to die with my boots on," Rive did just that, remaining active until his death on December 30.