Cinema: The New Pictures, Dec. 14, 1959

The New Picture

The 400 Blows (Zenith International). A small boy stands at the bottom of a giant tin can, the centrifuge in an amusement park. As the can begins to spin, the centrifugal force moves him to the outer walls. Faster and faster it goes. Soon the boy can move neither backward nor forward; he is the prisoner of the machine. Searching for freedom, he scrambles along the walls upside down. The machine, he discovers, has repealed the natural law that keeps his feet on the ground. It has robbed him of all relationship to the true center of things.

The child in the centrifuge stands for modern man in the society he has made. This is the metaphor at the core of this cruel, powerful picture from France, in which the New Wave of cinematic creation matches the high-water mark established by Black Orpheus (TIME, Nov. 16). Like that film, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) is the work of an unknown: a 27-year-old cinema critic named Francois Truffaut, who made the film for only $110,000. Last May the picture won him the Cannes Film Festival's award for the year's best direction, and it is expected to make about $1,000,000.

Director Truffaut, who also wrote the script with Marcel Moussy, tells a story that derives from his own childhood experiences in a reform school. His hero is a French schoolboy (Jean-Pierre Léaud), about twelve years old, who lives with his mother and father in a Paris tenement. Actually, the boy's father is just a man his mother married when she found herself pregnant—a nice, easygoing nobody who brings home a steady salary and doesn't ask too many questions. The mother herself is no better than she should be: a pretty, shallow blonde who consults only her own pleasure and takes it where the grass is greener. She works all day in an office. At night she gives her son the back of her tongue and the heel of the bread; and when she thinks he is asleep, she pesters her husband to "board him out so I can have some peace."

The boy learns early to "defend" himself, as the French say. Naturally independent, he soon becomes a proficient liar, steals from his mother's purse, cheats in class, plays hooky. Finally the boy decides to "faire les quatre cents coups" (go for broke). He runs away from home, and to get money steals a typewriter from his father's office. He tries to sell it, finds he cannot, and is caught when he returns the machine. Horrified, his father takes him to the police station "to teach him a lesson." The children's court sends him to an "observation center" in the country, where young offenders are literally knocked into shape. His mother visits him only to tell him that he can never come back home. "Your father . . . has lost his job because of you . . . and is completely disinterested in your fate."

Desperate, the boy escapes. He runs and runs. At last he reaches the sea. He can go no farther. Bewildered and heartsick, he turns back to face life, society, the audience. And at that instant the camera stops. A life is arrested, an existence fades into the sort of candid camera photograph that can be seen every day in the tabloids.