There are Hitchcocks I do not wish to look at

There are ways of being handled, I do not enjoy; and this not hauteur, it's autonomy. The more one learns how to give oneself, the more one tires of a tease in which one cannot take part. An elegant jest, embedded in the structure of a work, is estimable. Così fan tutte is not a corrida. Psycho is.

There are no Truffauts I will not look at, even Tirez sur le pianiste. One hates to say, Chaplin, one hates to say, Renoir in watching Truffaut, because he is one's own generation's filmlover. He was our maker of trust-worthy films of feeling, with the antic element in his immortal Doinel cycle, his celebration of women from Jules et Jim to Adèle H to La Sirène to Day for Night. L'enfant sauvage is an extraor-dinarily delicate work framed by a belyingly terse and dispassionate script. He brought a sensibility to American screens no one had seen from one man before.  It doesn't seem possible to be a cultivated man and cite a favourite among the films of François Truffaut, but one is hors de concours.

Léaud, Cocteau, Truffaut

Here are three fellows in a restaurant! It's late and they're a long way from Paris. The lad on the left has just been made famous by the man on the right, a protégé of the third. They are in Cannes for the Festival, 1959, and this is the most priceless table of genius that night in France. They're drinking Volnay, and celebrating the prize for Best Director. Unapologetic, radical, The 400 Blows projects a great gift: compassion.