French film director Georges Lautner has died in Nice aged 87 after a long illness.

He made 40 feature films, starting in the late 1950s and stretching into the mid-1990s, by which time his powers were waning.

But that was not before he made the deliciously immoral and knockabout “Les Tontons flingueurs”, 50 years young next week, and beloved as a cult movie by young and old alike.