I sincerely believe that The Last Metro must be seen by anyone seriously interested in the cinema. One may not be exactly enchanted by Truffaut's canny blend of history and romance in this tale of a theatre troupe's trials and tribulations in '40s German-occupied Paris. But who knows?…

The Last Metro reflects a certain degree of nostalgia for a period and a genre in which the moral commitments of characters could be taken for granted. What disturbs me the most about The Last Metro is that the uneasy mixture of fact and fantasy is never adequately articulated into a coherent whole. Truffaut is trying to establish connections between theatre and politics, between personal relationships and political involvements, between the idealism of the few and the pragmatism of the many. (p. 47)

Truffaut's characters in The Last Metro are not, by and large, obsessed ideologues. Even the members of...