[The 400 Blows is a sad, bitter] story of a child's gradual disaffection from society. The child is tough, imaginative, exuberant; the society is dull, timid, corrupt. But the film's point of view isn't sentimental…. The 400 Blows does not exist on a plane of fantasy; its premises are not allegorical. It is about the suffering an average young schoolboy must endure if he has the bad luck to be considered a criminal by both his family and the state in what we can only take to be present-day Paris. Given the actualities of this situation, and a manifest talent for observation, Truffaut's approach may seem to American audiences strangely stoical. He seems to be able to accept bad luck in good grace and still move us to moral indignation.

Truffaut is not, in the political sense, engaged. He protests in terms of the transcendent values; he protests the inhumanity...