The 400 Blows (1959)

Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is one of the most important films of the French New Wave and one of the most intensely moving coming of age stories ever to be put on screen. The director’s first film, made before his 27^th birthday, the movie is an exemplar of Truffaut’s best qualities as a filmmaker: his clarity, honesty, directness, his simplicity and deep feeling. A semiautobiographical movie, The 400 Blows follows the 12 year old Antoine Dionel (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who would reprise the role another four times), typecast by his mostly absent parents and socially incompetent teachers as a troublemaker and a liar, and lets us share in his minor joys and sorrows. The film’s personal nature is made obvious even before the opening credits, when we find out the film is dedicated to influential critic of Cahiers du Cinema and Truffaut’s mentor, Andre Bazin. The sense of intimacy and immediacy continues through the first few shots of the movie, long fluid takes of the middle-class quarters of the city in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. This is a Parisian’s Paris, seen in traveling shots of the empty streets and buildings and low angle shots directly under the tower, not the postcard cityscape establishing shots.

Quelle Girl: "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," Film and Book

A stylish, simply yet elegantly dressed young woman steps in front of Tiffany’s on an empty New York street. Large, dark glasses cover her eyes, a tiara sits upon her frosted beehive, she is dripping pearls, and her slim, long black evening dress perfectly matches her black sandals. A soft, sweet song evokes a mood of melancholy yearning as the golden light of dawn washes over the scene. When Audrey Hepburn watched her reflection in that shop window in 1961, she set the entire tone and look of a movie and created a character that would come to inhabit the minds and hearts of the public for decades to come.

Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” first published in the November 1958 issue of Esquire, was adapted by director Blake Edwards and writer George Axelrod with a light touch. Dealing with comedy, romance, and poignancy in a swanky Upper East Side setting, the movie follows Holly Golightly, a charming, carefree, independent New York party girl, and her upstairs neighbor, writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard). While the film hews closely to its source material for the most part, maintaining much of the pungent, comical, racy dialogue (with some lines tuned down to Production Code standards), the few liberties it does take are not insignificant. The tone of Capote’s story was harder and more cynical; Edwards makes it soft and sentimental, bestowing upon it a Hollywoodized happy ending, dropping some characters and adding others, and turning the subjective point of view of the novella objective, and its narrator, a dispassionate admirer and friend, into a romantic interest.

***This is not a review of the film, but a comparative analysis of the Capote’s novella and its screen adaptation, and it contains spoilers.