SOURCE: "From 400 Blows to Small Change." in The New Republic, Vol. 176, No. 14, April 2, 1977, pp. 23-5.

In the following review, Mast compares Small Change to Truffaut's earlier film The 400 Blows. Mast states that although both films have similar subject matter. Small Change has a lighter tone.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about François Truffaut's Small Change is that it was made by the same man who made The 400 Blows. In his most recent film, Truffaut returns to the subject and setting of his first feature film—the world of children and the schoolroom, the contrast between that world as children see it and as adults see it. But as opposed to the bitterness, the pain, the sarcasm in Truffaut's earlier contrast of childhood innocence with the shades of the adult prisonhouse, Small Change is a benign, bemused and accepting view of the inevitable contrast. The difference between Small...