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 The machine, he discovers, has repealed the natural law that keeps his feet on the ground.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.

The moment is stunning. By a master stroke of direction, beautifully executed by Cameraman Henri Decae, the spectator is personally accused of everything that has happened to the boy, and is forced to feel his share of mankind’s social guilt. The boy actor, who had never faced a movie camera before Truffaut found him, plays faultlessly and with pure, unsentimental appeal, mostly in his own unrehearsed words and gestures. Truffaut threw away the script in several scenes and let the boy play it as he felt it. The mother and father, professional actors, achieve the same effect with a skillful sort of caught-in-the-acting. In every frame Director Truffaut’s force and intelligence are felt. He has remarkable control of his medium and of himself. His treatment of this personal theme is impressively objective and mature. The boy is no little darling. The parents are not evil monsters out of Dickens. Truffaut’s people are merely people, doing their limited best, caught in the relentless, centrifugal round of daily life.

Operation Petticoat (Granart; Universal-International) treats World War II as a big, noisy joke. The story starts in Manila, just after Pearl Harbor—an event that seems to have left the officers and men of the submarine Sea Tiger in a curiously boyish mood. As they repair their boat, which has been damaged in a Japanese air raid, they make a long seris of elaborate jokes about toilet paper. Ar thereafter, as the scene unrolls, toil paper turns out to be an important element in the plot.

The hero (Tony Curtis) is a natural born operator who starts out to find some hygienic supplies for Sea Tiger. Soon he is “scrounging,” i.e., stealing, vast quantities of naval stores in a manner apparently intended to suggest that he is true-blue, anti-authoritarian all-America boy. On the way back to a base in Australia, Scrounger Curtis comes up with rather alarming array of military equipment, including five Army nurses who have been marooned on an outpost island. The rest of the picture explores the comic possibilities—somewhat limited—( playing house aboard a submarine.

What the script offers, at any rate, a lot more bathroom humor, including one scene in which a pig is discovered in the officers’ “head” (“They’re drafting everybody these days”). And there are about 20 scenes in which big-busted babes squeeze past bulge-eyed bluejackets in narrow passageways. There is also plenty of coy conversation. “When a person irritable,” the girl with the biggest bust assures Lieut. Commander Gary Gran “he’s not getting enough of something. So she offers him a vitamin pill. Before the girls are through, the sub is painted pink, the valve spring in a pump has bee replaced by a nylon girdle, and the sub itself preserved from sure destruction by a distress signal in the fetching form of nurse’s brassière.

Anyway, there is one good line. When a nurse accidentally drops a cigarette in Grant’s coffee cup, he stares for an install in silent revulsion, then flashes her charming smile and says, “It’s quite a right. I like a cigarette with my coffee.