The 400 Blows

Before this film François Truffaut was a critic, brutal enough to be the only French critic left off the invitation list for the 1958 Cannes festival. A year later the festival opened with his debut, he took the directing prize and the OCIC award, and the Palme d’Or went to Black Orpheus. At the 32nd Academy Awards he and Marcel Moussy were nominated for story and screenplay written directly for the screen; Pillow Talk took it. The passage everyone remembers is not really acting. The psychologist questioning Antoine is never shown, Jean-Pierre Léaud improvised much of it, and the exchange is one shot with lap dissolves between answers. Léaud came out of an audition of upwards of 60 boys and played the same character in 4 later films. Truffaut dedicated the film to André Bazin, the critic who pulled him into the work and died as shooting began. One sequence is lifted straight from Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. The English title is a flat mistranslation: the French idiom is about raising hell, not being hit. A good fit if it matters that the reform school was shot at Honfleur, the closing beach at Villers-sur-Mer, the rest in real Paris streets. Not for you if you need the final freeze frame to settle something; it stops and explains nothing.