On Screen

...A half dozen such New Wave films have arrived in this country...

...Despite their dedication to puniness, the director-writer (Louis Malle) or producer-director (Claude Chabrol) seem able to articulate in almost any direction from delicate (The Lovers) to wild lyricism (Black Orpheus), from pedantically worked-out plots (The Cousins and Back to the Wall) to a prize-winning movie by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) that seems to have been patched together with a distinct aversion to storytelling...

...Only occasionally is the imagery interesting enough, as in the finale of the above sequence (and of the movie), which shows the small boy slowing down as he reaches the shore, then circling in a curiously wistful, halting stride, finally turning about face into a striking closeup...

...The 400 Blows is pockmarked with endless shots of comically uneasy meals, uncomfortable sleeping positions, people crossing the street or watching others cross, looking awkward and unreasonable...

...Including some others like Marcel Camus and Malle, they center their films around an unlikeable character, surround him with hangnail figures...

...The various techniques have in common, mainly, an expediency that makes use of types of ornamentation: repetition, wandering tours, short story tricks of impact and sensationalism to fill out what is basically a skimpy, not very solidly composed, film...

...Along with his natural bent for shattered effects, stop-go rhythms that have an illusion of immediacy, Truffaut has a knack for communicating the uneasiness of life about him, of the fussy and despoiled, though too often he achieves it by diddling his people and situations annoyingly like a piano player stoically hitting the same sour note...

...In The 400 Blows, Truffaut's delinquent (Jean-Pierre Leaud) bounces downhill past trouble after trouble, showing even less talent as a schoolboy terror than he does as a student...

...then, unlike the older, kindlier movie-makers, they retire to a critical observer's post where the chief ploy is quietly to beat down the virtuous law student or trifling wife to an unsympathetic ending...

...With his graceless reed figure and a face that seems to crack in rare displays of boyish bravado or tears, Leaud's is not a bad depiction of inarticulateness...

...The sadly sweet, ill-fated New Wave character is usually found in situations—an empty highway, a lonely shore, an amusement park ride, in the audience at a puppet show, a printing establishment after hours—driven less by demands of the story than by the fact that the set-up has a built-in quality that can be captured by a Pathe type of cameraman using little if any direction, acting or foresight...

...the boy trying to do tricks gets stuck upside down halfway up the wall...

...One sequence in which Truffaut symbolizes society's autocratic hold is typical of his best work as an improviser: He works some powerful frozen touches into the wild scene of people stuck like carbuncles to the whirling wall of a "ride" at the amusement park...

...and in many cases the movie leaned toward heavy satire (The Great McGinty) or thumping displays of exotic spookiness (Val Lewton's productions...

...Nor does it hide the dreary fact that Truffaut is tritely stating that children's problems are the result of the nearly undiluted cruelty and stupidity of cop, parent, psychiatrist, clerk and teacher...

...By way of this mass of redundancy and trivia, the spectator's thoughts have been maneuvered away from plot, acting and character development toward a tricky, if not original impression: a Being taking flight in desperation, not from house, family or school, but from society in toto...

...This terminating shot, static and roughly journalistic, has the potent effect of moving the boy out of the film into the here and now...

...Meanwhile, the camera angles and choice of backgrounds give the viewer nothing: an eye-level, middle-distance shot, the camera swiveling in a repetitious ellipse on a series of unchanging pastoral scenes...

...the sincerity behind the naturalistic technique (Carol Reed's The Stars Look Down) could be cut with a knife...

...The most valuable asset of the Frenchmen: the apparent belief that what movies need are better amateurs...

...In a representative passage (The 400 Blows), a 13-year-old problem child sneaks out of a reformatory, and commences a wierd run that suggests a newsreel impression of miler Herb Elliott endlessly rerun...

...The renaissance in French films, which has finally displaced the tradition started by the old giant directors (Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, et al...

...Truffaut's film, nevertheless, has an advantage over colleagues Chabrol (The Cousins) and Malle (The Lovers) in that there is a minor but interesting personality discernible in the work...

...In past days when a movie was made on a shoestring, a director often used a starved or shrunken metier for Big effects...

...The boy never stops, never slows down, never shows the slightest emotion until he reaches a seashore several days distant...

...He is no humorist and proves it repeatedly (the small fry struggling with a faulty pen), but he is an opportunist who occasionally comes up with a memorable stroke...

...And it is now possible to isolate the French newcomers as sophisticates whose penchant for setting up a pessimistic story involving unlovable nonentities is matched by a coldly objective, nearly one-dimensional movie style and a general attitude about movie-making that insists on artfulness carefully concealed by an off-hand manner...

...Throughout this cross-country junket, the film fidgets along in a monotone manner, making no play at suspense, derring-do or any of the traditional ingredients of movie chase...

...Most of the actors walk a tightrope of barely adequately expressed behavior, seeming to take no chances for warmth or a deep mobilization of feeling...

...But this can not dispel the fact that, though he is presented as a classic example of the unloved, meanly used terror, the boy is a pale, hardly terrifying copy of the kids who have been making tabloid headlines...

...In the close quarters of a small apartment, the simplified vilification of adults isn't so apparent and the heavy Problem tag around the boy's neck doesn't interfere with his attempts to be natural, graceful, human...

...the plot often jumped from one monumental incident to another (Open City...

...While none of the new Frenchmen has the working range or richness of an early Hitchcock or Reed, they get good mileage out of their narrow methods and have found a way of coaxing the viewer's mind toward implicit ideas with a quiet voice and a curious mannerism of freezing a picayune effect on screen...

...The most successful part of The 400 Blows takes place in the delinquent's home, when Truffaut forgets his airtight methods with symbols and ideas, and simply allows life to breathe and evolve on screen...

...The least admirable trait of New Wave poets, exemplified by related people in Hollywood who are also hip "youngsters" and "geniuses," is that they are so wondrously efficient in so little an Exercise: a play-it-by-ear job of candid realism (Marty, 12 Angry Men) in which there are signs of creative gall, and larger signs of its absence, and in which the chances for flopping at box offices have been measured with too much sophistication...

...For the New Wave creator, the road is more important than the individuals who travel it—the typical road passing through a diseased landscape marked by obvious types of misunderstanding, cruelty, self-righteousness, faulty education...

...Here, Truffaut delights with visual patterns, postures, timing, the slumbrous Vuiellard lighting that hangs over a boy doing his homework at a dining table, the snarl of traffic in a hallway that turns it into the most important room, the touching relationships around a child in rooms crowded with everything from garbage smell to parental attempts at jollity that inevitably backfire...

...ON SCREEN New Low Pressure Films by French Amateurs Start Small and Cold and Stay That Way By Manny Farber UNLIKE the early directors of low-budget films, the recent experimentalists from France have worked their way into the hearts of art theater owners with a low pressure film that is notable in that, like the paintings of Corot, it starts small and stays that way...

...The acting (Victor McLaglen in The Informer) might be bull-like in its unleashed flamboyance...

...evolved after the first successes of Truffaut and Chabrol...