A photograph "directed" by Francois Truffaut in a recent Esquire [August, 1970] shows him reclining jauntily on a chair, his back turned to us while he puffs on an enormous cigar; his face is ingeniously reflected toward us in the open French window. The shot and the accompanying article seem to confirm what many have been suspecting for a long time. The cigar, the cutely oblique point-of-view, the claim that he makes films for the man in the street—isn't this all the outcome of Truffaut's whoring after false gods, and one portly god in particular? Pauline Kael, with typical nuance, concluded long ago that Truffaut is "a bastard pretender to the commercial throne of Hitchcock" [see excerpt above].

It is a tempting charge. After all, didn't the great trilogy and half of The Soft Skin [La peau douce] recall the work of the grand old man of French...