Number 187 on IMDb's Top 250
Antoine was born while his mother was unmarried (as is revealed later in the film). Afterwards she married an older man to "give him a name." She is unhappy in her married life and resents Antoine because of the situation. The family is financially insecure, and Antoine is poorly dressed and poorly fed, and sleeps in a sleeping bag (which he prefers because "at least it's warm") on a cot crammed next to the back entrance to the apartment. Both his mother and his step-father consider him an unwanted burden.
He engages in a series of childish pranks, usually at the instigation of his schoolmates, and bears the blame for each of them.
Eventually, at the instigation of his friend Rene, he pilfers a typewriter from his father's workplace. After he and Rene find that it cannot be pawned, he attempts to return it. When he is apprehended by the night-watchman his step-father turns him in to the police. Hilarity ensues.
Trivia: The title of the film comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups", meaning "to raise hell". All spoken lines in the film are dubbed over again by the actors themselves, save for a few minor and trivial parts. For instance, during the last scene, the sound of Antoine's foot prints were added during editing--the truck that the camera rested upon produced too much noise. Shooting on the streets of Paris, as many films of the French New Wave did, was often hectic and re-dubbing everything allowed Truffaut to not have to worry about lugging bulky and expensive sound equipment around, and more importantly, he would not have to worry about a street scene having too much background noise. This made shooting faster and easier.
This is one of those nothing ever really happens movies. We follow the everyday life of a young man through a few weeks of his life. His mother doesn't like him, his step father doesn't like him, his teachers don't like him. He goes to school...sometimes. Twice he runs away from home. His parents seem a little concerned about this, but not much. This is the first film Francois Truffaut ever directed. Truffaut is one of those directors that have a reputation as good directors like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini whom you have to love just because of who they are. Well it was an okay movie, that's about all I can say. My favorite Truffaut moment is still when he plays the French scientist in the extraordinary science fiction masterpiece, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Next Up: Probably The Wild Bunch, but it may be Anatomy of a Murder.
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