THE 400 BLOWS (LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS)

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

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1959 - France (Les Films du Carrose/Sedif Productions)

DIRECTOR: François Truffaut
SCRIPT: François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy
PHOTOGRAPHY: Henri Decaë
MUSIC: Jean Constantin

     Will it not be a little bit worrying if I start with the words 'I was dreading this film so much'? And also, if I add that I have not had seen this film before, I knew nothing about it and all I knew about the director was just his significance to the La Nouvelle Vague? I guess it would, if I were a pay-for film critic, but thankfully I am nothing more than a one-of-a-billion cinema enthusiast occupying a tiny little corner of those mighty internets. It still doesn't make it quite OK but at least there's no one here to kick me out of this job, and then again, appreciate the honesty. After all I must be the only person (or at least one of very few) who doesn't mind to admit to it, instead of copy&paste-ing fragments from Wikipedia pretending, that I knew it all since I was five.

     So, yes, the bottom line is that THE 400 BLOWS surprised me, and surprised me positively which is the kind of surprising I don't mind in the slightest. So let's break it down into a handful of paragraphs to see why.

12 ANGRY MEN

source: Wikipedia

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1957 - U.S.A. (Orion-Nova)

DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
SCRIPT: Reginald Rose
PHOTOGRAPHY: Boris Kaufman
MUSIC: Kenyon Hopkins 

   Only now I properly realised what did I get myself into. And don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the fact that for the next 20 years or so I have committed myself into writing a blog that has a very slight significance in the grand scale of things, or that the list of films is swarming with titles which normally I would appreciate no more than a persisting itch in the gentlemanly areas. No. That I can live with, I've worked as a journalist for long enough to be able to convince myself that 'professionalism demands it' and since professionalism is a frame of mind, not being paid and hardly even read, doesn't change anything here. So no, it's not that. What really started to bother me, just before I've watched my first film, was the cold realisation, that I'm going to be reviewing films, sometimes forgotten, mostly obscure, very often quite foreign, and still try not to include spoilers. Why? Because that's something the 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE did not manage to achieve. And I don't want to be just as good. I need to be one step ahead. I need to be better.

Which is going to be, in publishable words, rather difficult.