[Bed and Board completes Truffaut's] life story disguised as Antoine Doinel. The first installment was The 400 Blows, then there was an episode in the anthology picture, Love at Twenty, then the pleasant Stolen Kisses. But there was a great discrepancy between the first Antoine and the hero of that last film, and it's no easier to believe in the wholeness of the character now that the story is concluded….

Style is what is being hailed in Bed and Board, but charm is what is being merchandised, as calculatedly as in any France-for-export film of the 1930s….

But for all the incessantly pumped bonhomie, the picture sags, with no such nice touches as the shoe-shop encounter of the lovelorn stranger in Stolen Kisses. If a fiction artist uses autobiography and it doesn't nourish his work, he is in trouble. Truffaut badly needs something in his life to fertilize his...