François Truffaut has had a career not untypical of some of our most gifted filmmakers: a brilliant start followed by considerable floundering. No cinematic oeuvre could have begun more felicitously than his, with that remarkable trio of films, The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim. These pictures combined vitality with poignancy; they were informed by a nervous rhythm that could nevertheless linger over lyrical incidents, and a hard-bitten humor one could almost as easily cry as laugh at. Each of these films, for all the director's very pronounced personality, retained its own particular flavor: there were no repetitions, no transposable parts.

But already with his fourth feature, The Tender Skin, Truffaut was in trouble, and though there were many good sequences in Stolen Kisses and The Wild Child, and some good ideas unsteadily blinking in The Story of Adèle H., there were other...