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Truffaut, 36, has described this film as his "homage to Hitchcock." It is indeed filled with echoes of the old mas ter's style: long, slow tracking shots, comic functionaries, vibrant, stinging music. But for the most part, Truffaut is, happily, himself. Even Hitchcock could not stretch so many individual scenes to the limit—and still give them the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. Nor has he the almost Proustian ability to recapture the past in a skein of memories and desires. In its avoidance of a major theme, The Bride Wore Black opts for the minor genre of suspense; but within those bounds it is very nearly a masterpiece.
"You are looking for Francois?" Roland Truffaut asked the truant officer. "Go look for him where he always is—at the movies." Even as a child, Francois Truffaut made cinema his preferred vocation: the life he led up until his first feature was just so much prologue before the credits. The son of a Parisian architect, he had a history of juvenile delinquency and truancy that ended in a short reformatory stretch—an experience that was to become the basis for his first film. As an adolescent film fanatic, he came to the attention of André Bazin, dean of French movie critics, who took Truffaut into his personal custody when, at the age of 18, the youth was discharged from the army as an "unstable personality."
Under Bazin's guidance, Truffaut quickly stabilized and began to write film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the recondite French movie journal that then housed such nouvelle vague cineasts as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Truffaut proved so corrosive a critic that in 1958 he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival and forced to snipe at targets he could not see. What he could see, however, was Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of a film executive whose products had received Truffaut's hardest knocks. After they were married, Truffaut continued his criticism, this time at the family dinner table. In exasperation, Papa Morgenstern challenged his son-in-law to make films as good as the ones he criticized—and provided enough money for the brash young man to make a fool of himself.
Lifetime Diary. Instead, he made a name for himself with The 400 Blows, a title derived from a French slang expression "faire les 400 coups," meaning "to go on a spree." The movie told the mordant story of a disintegrating childhood that was half autobiography and half poetry. Truffaut later observed that "a director's total work is a diary, kept over a lifetime." This first entry revealed hints of the style that was to follow: despair that could add up to an affirmation of life, poignance that never stooped to self-pity, Mack Sennett farce that could dive into tragedy and come up smiling.