Francois Truffaut

...and the correspondence with Truffaut's oldest friend, Robert Lachenay, reveals how similar was not only his background but also his temperament to that of his alter ego...

...In the films this sympathetic understanding is lavished on the lost, the bewildered, the inept, the obsessed, and the broken-hearted—his letters show that it can also exist, more quietly, in the common business of everyday life...

...Those who know Truffaut as the director of The 400 Blows and subsequent chapters in the life history of Antoine Doinel, of Jules and Jim, The Wild Child, Small Change, The Man Who Loved Women, and The Last Metro, especially, will instantly recognize the same humor, intelligence, and sympathy in these letters to friends and colleagues...

...This hatred of hypocrisy is another of Truffaut's childlike characteristics, as is his vision of humanity in relentlessly concrete and particular terms...

...It should be said, by the way, that the quarrel was sufficiently forgotten fifteen years later for Godard to have contributed a characteristically opaque foreword to this volume, but he still gives the impression of not quite understanding what all the fuss was about—as if he had a kind of divine right to be outrageous just for the sake of it...

...The letters also show the genesis of his passionate seriousness about filmmaking and films—which, on more than one James Bowman is American correspondent for the Spectator of London...

...This is what gives the letters a distinctive tone—so like that of his most charming films...

...Film buffs will enjoy this volume for the insight that it gives into Truffaut's working methods, but to me its value lies chiefly in the portrait that emerges of Truffaut the man, whose love and understanding of his art is equalled only by his love and understanding of the human heart...

...Truffaut's reply is a masterpiece of controlled rage and scatological invective, yet he is indignant chiefly at Godard's shabby behavior toward two or three of their mutual friends...

...Sometimes he is even self-consciously childlike...

...At which point, we were astonished to see the policeman release Sartre's arm, begin to walk more quickly, draw ahead of our group and rush off at such a speed that it would have been necessary to start running in order to catch up with him...

...Truffaut returns again and again to his anger at those who, while pretending to a disinterested love of "the masses," cannot be bothered to show ordinary human consideration toward individuals...

...In the same way, he is incapable of the simplistic, Manichean generalizations so beloved of others on the left...

...But even at his most militant he manages to retain the wry detachment of the genuine artist, as when he was almost arrested in the company of that humorless old stick, Jean-Paul Sartre, while the two of them were selling La Cause du peuple in the streets of Paris...

...the director of Fahrenheit 451 was always willing to stick his neck out for that cause...

...There is no affectation of egalitarian or socialist rectitude, only simple honesty, when he writes to the Centre National de la Cinematographie that "lacking as I do all sense of civic responsibility, it would be hypocritical of me to seek some national honor...

...For, although he makes the occasional obeisance to the household gods of the left, he also candidly admits that he is himself the least political of men...

...Elsewhere he says, by way of apology to an employee he felt he had neglected: "On the pretext of protecting my films, which I've always treated as though they were children in danger, I haven't been attentive enough to other people's problems...

...Such playfulness is never cloying or silly, any more than is the cinematic biography of the manchild Antoine Doinel...

...rr he most striking example is in his 1 exchange of letters with Jean-Luc Godard in 1973 in which Godard, in typically thoughtless and unconsidered fashion, called Truffaut a liar...

...In fact, it is precisely this quality that Truffaut homes in on in the final flourish of the letter—an attack on Godard's "trendy Leftism": I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job...

...In his deposition to the President of the High Court, Truffaut explained that he had been wearing a suit and tie and was not arrested, while Sartre, who had been attired in more self-consciously proletarian fashion, was—so that "there was already . . . at the vestimentary level (as one says nowadays) a discrimination being made among the vendors of La Cause du peuple": What happened next only reinforced this impression, since a pedestrian, recognizing Sartre, shouted at the policeman, "You're surely not going to arrest a Nobel Prize-winner...

...In another letter to Helen Scott, he writes: "I haven't got in touch yet with your chum Frangoise Prasche, since I'm delaying that delightful moment the way children take forever over a dessert they've been longing for...

...19.95 paper James Bowman 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery...

...Of a "committed" folksinger he writes: "What I don't care for in Brassens is the division of the world in two: pacifists and warmongers, intelligent and stupid people, poets and bourgeois, lovers and cops...

...Such generosity is only a corollary to the openness and simplicity of his character: he is naturally humble and given to jokey self-depreciation, as when he says that, although La Chambre verte (The Green Room) got good reviews, the public response suggested to him that it ought to have been called La Chambte vide (The Empty Room...

...He delights in joking with his correspondents, in playing with words and inventing epithets (Arthur Winston, film critic of the New York Post, is "hairy chops") and in whimsy, as when he writes to his friend and translator, Helen Scott, of his book on Hitchcock: My dream would be for this book never to come out and for you and me to spend a month together every year bringing it up to date, adding new questions and conducting new interviews with the maestro, in short a few weeks of Hollywood holidays every year...

...I can only conclude this testimony by advising my colleagues, the vendors of La Cause du peuple, to wear their Sunday best every day and refuse the Nobel Prize if ever it is offered to them...

...But you, you're the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the camera to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: CORRESPONDENCE 1945-1984 Edited by Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray The Noonday Press-Farrar, Straus & Giroux/590 pp...

...When Steven Spielberg hired Truffaut to play the UFO specialist, Claude Lacombe, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he said it was because he was "a man with the soul of a child . . . He resembles all the children in his films...

...occasion, he compares to children: "Films are babies and the world, in consequence, can be divided into two: what's good for the baby and what's not good for the baby...

...It is what saves him from the more properly infantile leftism of the French intelligentsia of the fifties and sixties, which he is otherwise predisposed to adopt...

...Yet, when he feels that he has been treated unjustly or, especially, that his friends have been badly treated, he displays a moral passion which, though childlike indeed in its power and simplicity, has a mature toughness and wisdom about it...

...The one political sentiment that genuinely energizes him is belief in free speech...

...That was all the proof we needed that there did indeed exist a double standard, and that one is more likely to be arrested if one happens to look like a fishy customer, or rather a fishy vendor...