MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every Friday.
The 400 Blows (1959, in French with English subtitles, 99 minutes)
For a few fleeting seconds, the camera focuses through the bars of the back door of a moving police van and catches the pathetic young face of Antoine Doinel as tears, reflected in the Paris moonlight, stream down his face. Doinel (perfectly underplayed by a babyfaced 13-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud) has been caught with a typewriter he’s stolen from his father’s office building. Although he’s not old enough to shave, he’s about to become acquainted with the criminal-justice system, accompanied to his first police booking by a pair of weary prostitutes. The 400 Blows, François Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical 1959 directorial debut, is now considered a bulwark of French new-wave cinema.
For Antoine, it all starts at home, in a flat so tiny his mother (Claire Maurier) must step around his bed to get to the bathroom after arriving home late from a “year-end inventory” session with her boss. His father (Albert Rémy) is more concerned with his automobile club than raising a child born a year before he met Antoine’s mother. The boy’s school life is just as miserable. One dictatorial teacher (Guy Decomble)—dubbed “sourpuss” by his students—deals out stinging slaps to the face of anyone found delinquent.
There are occasional tender moments in Antoine’s life. He sits brushing his hair, peering into his mother’s mirror while a melancholy bossa-nova guitar gently weeps in the background. But it’s mostly Antoine clumsily forging an “illness” excuse in his mother’s handwriting, or the young boy turning pale at a bus stop while two old crones gossip about a bloody Caesarean section. Even Antoine’s finer impulses run aground. When the candle he’s lit in a shrine to Balzac ignites his bedroom wall in the middle of dinner, the boy gets his ears boxed by his dad.
Antoine and close pal René (Patrick Auffay) cut school frequently to play pinball at an arcade and spend long hours at the local cinema on money stolen from their parents. With home and school now becoming impossible, Antoine decides to run away and spends his first night solo sleeping in a local print shop. It’s so cold the next morning, he must crack the ice in a public fountain to wash his face before he steals a bottle of milk from a nearby doorstep.
The camera relentlessly follows the truant Antoine as he’s pinned by centrifugal force against the rotating wall of a circular amusement-park ride. As he stumbles to the ground afterward, barely able to walk and totally disoriented, it’s a harbinger of things to come. There are greater forces at work here that will soon spin Antoine’s young life totally out of control.
