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Co-written by debuting director Francois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, The 400 Blows (French: Les Quatre Cents Coup), one of the defining films of the French New Wave, opens in Paris to ecstatic reviews. In a coup of perfect casting, Jean-Pierre Leaud is remarkable as a bright, precocious 13 year-old Parisian boy whose disruptive classroom antics and parental neglect conspire to nudge him toward a life of truancy, petty crime and vagrancy. An unsentimental, cinema-verite-style portrait of adolescent disenranchisement, the film wins Truffaut the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and quickly becomes a classic of French cinema.
