Uh oh, students and faithful reading several, we are apporaching the halfway point in our course in post modern film history. Your favorite blog writer, that’s me, in case you were wondering, had to take a mid term exam for the first six flims in this series last night and boy, was it the easiest test I have ever taken! What a way to falsely inflate my GPA! But I digress…

This week in the syllabus, the genre of discussion is the French New Wave of cinema in which basically some french film critics had said “Oh, I can make better films than what I am reviewing” and so they put their money where their mouths were and attempted to do so. Say what you will about the French, but that is a pretty ballsy thing for someone to do.

Like most of the films so far in this series, The 400 Blows is an movie I have always read about but never had a chance to actually see. Of course, when I say “always read about” I mean that it is mentioned briefly in the introduction in the now classic Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book.

Now that I have finally seen the 400 Blows, I am shocked and amazed by the fact that Morrissey, has to my knowledge, never written at least 3 album tracks and 4 b-sides (2 of which would be utter shit) using this movie as source material. The plot line of The 400 Blows sounds like something he would find alot of inspiration in: Boy hates school, hates his parents, plays hooky with his much more interesting friend, sees his mom having an affair, gets in trouble at school by saying his mother is dead, gets in trouble and runs away, goes back home,  almost sets fire to his house by building an altar to the author Balzac (don’t ask,) runs away from home and lives with his much more interesting friend, gets caught stealing a typewriter from his dad’s office, goes to juvie hall, smokes a cigarette in jail, disowned by his parents, runs away from juvie hall and runs to the sea.

(Whew! On second thought, Morrissey could write a concept double album based on the 400 Blows.)

Of course I almost discounted this movie because of my disdain for films where the main characters are children, but seeing how the young lad in the 400 Blows acted like he was an adult, I was willing to waive my personal rule on the matter. It also didn’t hurt that the actress who played his mother  was really attractive, either. Wowza!

My only complaint about the 400 Blows that I have is this: at the end of the film when the lead character runs away from juvie hall and runs to the sea (which was etablished several times in the film that he has never seen before) we didn’t have to have real time footage of him actually running across the country to the sea. A simple montage of him running through different backgrounds would’ve sufficed.

next week on the syllabus: Psycho!

jareddriskill