The sensitive viewer of a Truffaut film will find himself making constant and subtle re-adjustments of his standard assumptions and preconceptions; he will emerge with a new awareness of the incongruous rhythms of life, of the inextricable mingling of beauty and sadness in everyday experience, but he will feel that he has discovered these for himself. Exactly because he does feel this, however, he may give the film-maker less credit than he deserves for the subtlety and intelligence with which he has brought about these re-adjustments. The style may seem so unobtrusive or "natural," the people so real, the behaviour so spontaneous, the final response so instinctive, that the viewer may feel less that he has been brought to this new stage of sensitivity than that Truffaut has merely brought it out of him. Though this may be partially correct, and it is a major element of Truffaut's...