Film · Cocinor · 1959
Pass it on
The 400 Blows
46Watch it awake.
Watch it awake, with an adult. The last shot is not a rescue, and the boy is not a symbol.
The review
He is a boy in a small Paris apartment. His mother is having an affair. His stepfather is genial and useless. School has already decided he is a problem. He skips, he lies, he steals a typewriter, and the institutions take over. The camera likes him without recruiting you into a romance of delinquency. The last shot, on a shore, does not tell you he will be all right. I am not going to tell you he will be all right either.
Older teenagers, with an adult in the room. This is one of the decade's necessary films and it is not a comfortable one. Ask which adult, by name, could have changed the week with an hour of attention, and did not. The answer is several. A house that watches this and only talks about the boy's eyes has missed it. The eyes are what the adults in the film already had in front of them. Attention was the missing thing. It is still the missing thing, which is why a film from 1959 can score a living room now.
Journal
Keep The 400 Blows in the record.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Live Historic number 46. Yours can differ.
The glance
Industry and Household and Piety and Republic and Stewardship are the thin ones.
Does anyone here do a real job, and does that job matter?
This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
Consider this
The Quiet Man
58 instead of 46
The Quiet Man is still a drama film, and it scores 58 instead of 46. What you gain is household: A marriage that has to be public to be real.
The eight
- 4Industry
School is a place he is failing, and the film is specific about the classroom.
- 3Household
A mother and a stepfather are the household, and they are distracted past the point of care.
- 3Piety
Almost no reverence, except the film's own refusal to turn him into a lesson.
- 5Courage
He runs. The running is a boy's courage and a boy's limit.
- 4Republic
Reform school is the public's answer, and the answer does not look at him.
- 5Temperance
Small appetites, a small theft. The film does not make the theft glamorous.
- 9Truth
The adults are inadequate in ordinary ways. Nothing is heightened into a monster except the neglect.
- 4Stewardship
A house can inherit a boy at the shoreline. The inheritance is a duty, not a mood.
Where to watch
Finding the page.
Live Historic · The 400 Blows · 46IMDb tt0053198
