Unlike The 400 Blows or Jules and Jim—the films
that have done the most to secure François Truffaut’s
reputation—Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and The Wild
Child (1970) are utterly inimitable. Both are showing this weekend
at the Northwest Film Center, and the screenings are guaranteed to be
this year’s must-see double bill for Criterion-collecting
cinephiles.
At first blush, the two films appear utterly different: Piano
Player is a baroque exercise in reckless genre-hopping, while
The Wild Child is a clinic of cinematic restraint. But a closer
look at Truffaut’s filmography reveals the kinship these two intensely
idiosyncratic films share.
Fifty years ago this spring, Truffaut began an adaptation of Down
There, the pulp novel by David Goodis, which eventually became
Shoot the Piano Player. With this, his second film—and the
follow-up to his critically lauded debut, 1959’s The 400
Blows—Truffaut tried to translate Goodis’ hardboiled prose
into a kind of accidental musical, where gangsters only spoke of dames
and the dames talked back. Critics and audiences shrugged their
shoulders.
It was their loss: Never again would Truffaut indulge his whims
quite so extravagantly. In reaction to Piano Player‘s critical
drubbing, the feisty pup of the French New Wave scooted through the
rest of the ’60s with his tail between his legs, inching closer each
time toward the bland “tradition of quality” he had attacked as a
critic in the 1950s. Sure, there were admirable Jean Renoir homages
(Jules and Jim) that kept him relevant, but there were also dull
Hitchcock pastiches (Mississippi Mermaid) and awkward attempts
to break big in English-speaking countries (Fahrenheit 451). By
the end of the ’60s, Truffaut was at another critical and commercial
low; his back against the wall, he started The Wild Child, an
ascetic retelling of a sort of noble savage’s tale. Truffaut himself
played a 19th century physician who takes a “wolf boy” into his home to
study and civilize him. For the first time since Shoot the Piano
Player, the director once again gave his obsessive streak free
reign over his more self-conscious, legacy-pruning tendencies.