And yet we see him in the alcove that serves as his bedroom, deeply wrapped in the work of Balzac, whose chronicles of daily life helped to create France’s idea of itself. He loves Balzac. He loves him so well, indeed, that when he’s assigned to write an essay on an important event in his life, he describes “the death of my grandfather” in a close paraphrase of Balzac, whose words have lodged in his memory. This is seen not as homage but as plagiarism, and leads to more trouble and eventually to a downward spiraclass="underline" He and a friend steal a typewriter; he gets caught trying to return it and is sent to the juvenile detention home.
The film’s most poignant moments show him set adrift by his parents and left to the mercy of social services. His parents discuss him sadly with authorities as a lost cause (“If he came home, he would only run away again”). And so he is booked in a police station, placed in a holding cell, and put in a police wagon with prostitutes and thieves, to be driven through the dark streets of Paris, his face peering out through the bars like a young Dickensian hero. He has a similar expression at other times in the film, which is shot in black and white in Paris in a chill season; Antoine always has the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind.
Truffaut’s film is not a dirge or entirely a tragedy. There are moments of fun and joy (the title is an idiom meaning “raising hell”). One priceless sequence, shot looking down from above the street, shows a physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris; two by two they peel off, until the teacher is at the head of a line of only two or three boys. The happiest moment in the film comes after one of Antoine’s foolish mistakes. He lights a candle to Balzac, which sets the little cardboard shrine on fire. His parents put out the flames, but then for once their exasperation turns to forgiveness, and the whole family goes to the movies and laughs on the way home.
There is a lot of moviegoing in The 400 Blows, with Antoine’s solemn face turned up to the screen. We know that young Truffaut himself escaped to the movies whenever he could, and there is a shot here that he quotes later in his career. As Antoine and a friend emerge from a cinema, Antoine steals one of the lobby photos of a star. In Day for Night (1973), which stars Truffaut himself as a film director, there is a flashback memory to the character, as a boy, stealing down a dark street to snatch a still of Citizen Kane from in front of a theater.
The cinema saved François Truffaut’s life, he said again and again. It took a delinquent student and gave him something to love, and with the encouragement of Bazin he became a critic and then made this film by his twenty-seventh birthday. If the New Wave marks the dividing point between classic and modern cinema (and many think it does), then Truffaut is likely the most beloved of modern directors—the one whose films resonated with the deepest, richest love of moviemaking. He liked to resurrect old effects (the iris shots in The Wild Child, narration in many of his films) and pay tribute (The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid owe much to his hero, Hitchcock).
Truffaut (1932–84) died too young, of a brain tumor, at fifty-two, but he left behind twenty-one films, not counting shorts and screenplays. His Small Change (1976) returns to the sharply remembered world of the classroom, to students younger than Doinel, and recalls the almost unbearable tension as the clock on the wall creeps toward the final bell. Even while directing a film a year, he found time to write about other films and directors, and did a classic book-length, film-by-film interview with Hitchcock.
One of his most curious, haunting films is The Green Room (1978), based on the Henry James story “The Altar of the Dead,” about a man and a woman who share a passion for remembering their dead loved ones. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thinks The Green Room may be Truffaut’s best film, told me he thinks of it as the director’s homage to the auteur theory. That theory, created by Bazin and his disciples (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), declared that the director was the true author of a film—not the studio, the screenwriter, the star, the genre. If the figures in the green room stand for the great directors of the past, perhaps there is a shrine there now to Truffaut. One likes to think of the ghost of Antoine Doinel lighting a candle before it.
Grand Illusion
NO MPAA RATING, 114 m., 1937
Jean Gabin (Lieutenant Maréchal), Dita Parlo (Elsa), Pierre Fresnay (Captain de Boeldieu). Directed by Jean Renoir. Produced by Albert Pinkovitch and Frank Rollmer. Screenplay by Renoir and Charles Spaak.
Apart from its other achievements, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion influenced two famous later movie sequences. The digging of the escape tunnel in The Great Escape and the singing of the “Marseilles” to enrage the Germans in Casablanca can first be observed in Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece. Even the details of the tunnel dig are the same—the way the prisoners hide the excavated dirt in their pants and shake it out on the parade ground during exercise.
But if Grand Illusion had been merely a source of later inspiration, it wouldn’t be on so many lists of great films. It’s not a movie about a prison escape, nor is it jingoistic in its politics; it’s a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I.
“Neither you nor I can stop the march of time,” the captured French aristocrat Captain de Boeldieu tells the German prison camp commandant, von Rauffenstein. A little later, distracting the guards during an escape of others from the high-security German fortress, the Frenchman forces the German to shoot him, reluctantly, and they have a final deathbed exchange. “Didn’t know a bullet in the stomach hurt so much,” he tells the German. “I aimed at your legs,” says the German, near tears. And a little later he says: “For a commoner, dying in a war is a tragedy. But for you and I—it’s a good way out.”
What the Frenchman knows and the German won’t admit is that the new world belongs to commoners. It changed hands when the gentlemen of Europe declared war. And the “grand illusion” of Renoir’s title is the notion that the upper classes somehow stand above war. The German cannot believe that his prisoners, whom he treats almost as guests, would try to escape. After all, they have given their word not to.
The commandant is played by Erich von Stroheim, in one of the most famous of movie performances. Even many who have not seen the movie can identify stills of the wounded ace pilot von Rauffenstein, his body held rigid by a neck and back brace, his eye squinting through a monocle. De Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), from an old aristocratic family, is a pilot von Rauffenstein personally shot down earlier in the war. The other two major characters are also French prisoners: Maréchal (Jean Gabin), a workingman, a member of the emerging proletariat, and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a Jewish banker who has ironically purchased the chateau that de Boeldieu’s family can no longer afford. The movie, filmed as the clouds of World War II were gathering, uses these characters to illustrate how the themes of the first war would tragically worsen in the second.
So pointed was Renoir’s message that when the Germans occupied France, Grand Illusion was one of the first things they seized. It was “Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1,” propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced, ordering the original negative seized. Its history since then would make a movie like The Red Violin, as the print moved across borders in shadowy ways. For many years it was assumed that the negative was destroyed in a 1942 Allied air raid. But as Stuart Klawans reported in the Nation, it had already been singled out by a German film archivist named Frank Hensel, then a Nazi officer in Paris, who had it shipped to Berlin. When Renoir supervised the assembly of a “restored” print in the 1960s, nothing was known of this negative. He worked from the best available surviving theatrical prints. The result, the version that has been seen all over the world until now, was a little scratched and murky, and encumbered by clumsy subtitles.