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Truffaut solidified his reputation with two films that are still considered landmarks in modern cinema history. Shoot the Piano Player was both a sly, imitative tribute to the Warner Bros, shootem-ups of the '30s and the existential drama of a man (Charles Aznavour) who can no longer respond to life. Jules and Jim was a near-perfect evocation of Montparnassian fin de siecle life, informed with psychological observations of the '60s. A blend of saline tragedy and dulcet comedy, it reinforced the burgeoning reputation of Actress Jeanne Moreau.
Truffaut's later films have seemed, for the most part, to go too far out or too close in. Partly to encourage backers who were dismayed at the commercial anemia of his critical successes, Truffaut in The Soft Skin abandoned the visual conceits of, narrow and widening screen and rocketing flashbacks that characterized his previous works. Skin was a mild film of convention that won few admirers. Fahrenheit 451, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, was his only true failure, an atypically emotionless sci-fi attempt to show the future as nightmare. The fact, of course, that it was done in English by a director who could not speak the language made the project disaster-prone from the beginning.
Cinematic disappointments have not seemed to impede Truffaut's aplomb. If anything, he has grown more secure and relaxed. Though he is still a chain-smoker, he abandoned nail biting when one of his daughters took it up. In a field where jealousies unreel at every screening, he remains genial. His praise extends to every film maker but one—Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni. "That is the one director whose sensibilities I cannot get inside," he says, possibly because the aridity of Antonioni's films is diametrically opposite to Truffaut's abiding humanism. Perhaps his favorite cinematic hero became the subject last year of a classic appreciation: Hitchcock, published by Simon & Schuster. A series of interviews by Truffaut, the dialogue is an insightful exchange that says as much about the sensitive disciple as about the witty, deprecating master.
The disciple is too busy to do any more books, though he still feels that Director Howard Hawks, the grand old man of the American western, deserves one. Truffaut has completed work on one new movie and plans to start filming another this fall. Each, in a different way, reveals the Truffaut genre: Stolen Kisses, which will soon open in the U.S., shows the rebel as before—but grown to maturity. Again, he is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, the juvenile star of The 400 Blows. The new project, The Siren of Mississippi, is to be yet another salute to American cinema, a story of mail-order romance starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Before starting work on Mississippi, Truffaut intends to take a short va cation to resume his favorite indoor sport. Interested parties can find Francois where the Parisian parole officers located him nearly 20 years ago—at the movies.