William Becker

William Becker, whose vision and financial savvy helped bring modern European film to American audiences, died of kidney failure at his house in Southampton on Saturday. He was 88.

In some five decades of involvement with Janus Films and the Criterion Collection, Mr. Becker contributed to the expansion of audiences and catalogs of what have become classic art house and foreign film titles, steadily adding new selections as the years went by.

He and a partner bought Janus, which had been successful in bringing films by Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman to America but had fallen on hard times, in 1965, and continued its commitment to such avant-garde directors as Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Luis Bunuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean Renoir. Criterion began in 1984 and was merged with another company to form a partnership with Janus. Criterion went on to release classic movies, both early and later ones, developing the “special edition” DVD with commentary and other enhancements.

Arthur William John Becker III was born in St. Louis on May 23, 1927, to Arthur Becker Jr. and the former Margaret Heath. He grew up and attended school in St. Louis and enrolled at Washington University there when he was 15, but transferred to Duke University and finally to Harvard, where he graduated. After naval service in Guam during the war, he was named a Rhodes Scholar, and wrote his dissertation at Oxford on the poet William Butler Yeats.

In addition to steering Janus to success and profitability through distribution to colleges, sales of rights to television, and, with his sons and his business partners, through video and DVD licensing, he was a writer, critic, and actor. His friends and family also described him as a lover of travel, particularly to Europe; a dedicated genealogist and gardener, and a great thinker, citing his aesthetic sensibilities and business acumen as key factors in his success. In a written remembrance, his friend Peter Cowie said he “adored the recondite and the arcane.”

In an email, his daughter, Alison Price Becker of New York City, wrote that the family started coming to the South Fork in the early 1960s, following George Plimpton and other friends. She remembered her father stopping one night on the way to Southampton to see, beyond barriers, the progress of the still-uncompleted Long Island Expressway. At their first house on Meadow Lane, he would hold movie parties and screen reel-to-reel movies from the Janus collection, films by Truffaut, Bergman, and Jean Renoir. At their second house in Southampton Village, Mr. Becker became an avid gardener and planned all the landscaping himself, his daughter said.

Mr. Becker is also survived by his wife, Patricia Birch Becker of New York and Southampton, and two sons, Jonathan Heath Becker of Manhattan and Peter Heath Becker of Brooklyn. He also leaves a sister, Jane Daniel of St. Louis.

The family plans a celebration of his life in New York City in October.