SOURCE: "Truffaut's Gorgeous Killers," in Film Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Winter, 1973–74, pp. 2-10.

In the following essay, Kinder and Houston consider the changing roles of women in Truffaut's films.

The central character in many of Truffaut's films is a profoundly seductive woman steeped in the archetypal mystery of the belle dame sans merci; she uses her sexual liberation like a femme fatale, to destroy a hero who is either sensitive and needy, or who mistakenly believes that his rationality will enable him to cope with her magic. Truffaut's earliest films present a combination of attraction and hostility in response to this kind of woman. In Les Mistons (1957), a group of boys tease and torment a young woman who is awakening their adolescent desires; they cannot forgive her amorous behavior with her fiancé, who later dies in an accident. In The 400 Blows (1959), the young boy is most vulnerable to...