The Bride Wore Black

At a French railway station a woman bids goodbye to a friend. Then she boards the train--and sneaks out on the other side of the platform. A classic Hitchcock opening for a film that is missing only one vital ingredient: Alfred Hitchcock. In the maestro's place, however, is his greatest disciple, Director Francois Truffaut, who considers Hitchcock "an artist of anxiety" to be placed alongside Kafka and Poe.

In The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut has Gallicized a novel by American Mystery Writer Cornell Woolrich and remade it in his own images. As revealed in a series of shuffled flashbacks, the groom and the bride (Jeanne Moreau) trip happily down the steps of a church and smile at the wedding party's photographer. A shot rings out, and the new husband falls. Five men are responsible for the killing, a group of drinking and hunting cronies who played with a gun until one of them accidentally became the trigger man. The thought of revenge becomes an idee fixe as the bride pathologically tracks down the handful of murderers. Before the kill she tells them who she is, and the phrase, "I am Julie Kohler," comes to have the chilling quality of a fanatic's political slogan.

Unlike Hitchcock's films, Bride has no overriding buildup of tension leading to a climactic finish. Instead, Truffaut provides a whole series of suspenseful crescendos--and finds voluptuous revelations and eerie beauty in each one of them. Under his low-keyed, meticulous direction, all the murdered men give subtle performances that would do credit to Giraudoux. Out standing is Michel Bouquet, pathetic yet loathsome as a pawky, balding bachelor who cannot believe his good fortune when a mysterious beauty comes to his shabby room with a bottle of strange-tasting liqueur. Scarcely less memorable is Charles Denner, a painter who poses Moreau as Diana the Huntress and gets an arrow in the back. Or Claude Rich as a womanizer who smirks curiously at Moreau until she pushes him off a balcony and his face turns from pure narcissism to pure terror. Another director might have made the balcony scene an urban one; Truffaut stages it along the Cote d'Azur, where Photographer Raoul Coutard makes the outside beckon like a Cezanne landscape. Even a minute role played by a little boy is observed with special insight. When Moreau puts on glasses and tries to con the boy into accepting her as his teacher, he reacts with an air of whimsical gamesmanship; it is a put-on, he decides, and who knows more about put-ons than little boys?

It is with Moreau herself that the director achieves his finest work. She has always had trouble juggling erotica and neurotica, and some of her latest films (Viva Maria, Sailor from Gibraltar) have made her seem to be slipping. With Bride she regains her stature as one of France's major actresses. As she approaches each deadly assignment, Moreau exhales a melancholy resignation that gives the scenes the inevitability of a tribal rite, at once primitive and sophisticated.

Truffaut, 36, has described this film as his "homage to Hitchcock." It is indeed filled with echoes of the old mas ter's style: long, slow tracking shots, comic functionaries, vibrant, stinging music. But for the most part, Truffaut is, happily, himself. Even Hitchcock could not stretch so many individual scenes to the limit--and still give them the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. Nor has he the almost Proustian ability to recapture the past in a skein of memories and desires. In its avoidance of a major theme, The Bride Wore Black opts for the minor genre of suspense; but within those bounds it is very nearly a masterpiece.

"You are looking for Francois?" Roland Truffaut asked the truant officer. "Go look for him where he always is--at the movies." Even as a child, Francois Truffaut made cinema his preferred vocation: the life he led up until his first feature was just so much prologue before the credits. The son of a Parisian architect, he had a history of juvenile delinquency and truancy that ended in a short reformatory stretch--an experience that was to become the basis for his first film. As an adolescent film fanatic, he came to the attention of Andre Bazin, dean of French movie critics, who took Truffaut into his personal custody when, at the age of 18, the youth was discharged from the army as an "unstable personality."

Under Bazin's guidance, Truffaut quickly stabilized and began to write film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema, the recondite French movie journal that then housed such nouvelle vague cineasts as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Truffaut proved so corrosive a critic that in 1958 he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival and forced to snipe at targets he could not see. What he could see, however, was Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of a film executive whose products had received Truffaut's hardest knocks. After they were married, Truffaut continued his criticism, this time at the family dinner table. In exasperation, Papa Morgenstern challenged his son-in-law to make films as good as the ones he criticized--and provided enough money for the brash young man to make a fool of himself.

Lifetime Diary. Instead, he made a name for himself with The 400 Blows, a title derived from a French slang expression "faire les 400 coups," meaning "to go on a spree." The movie told the mordant story of a disintegrating childhood that was half autobiography and half poetry. Truffaut later observed that "a director's total work is a diary, kept over a lifetime." This first entry revealed hints of the style that was to follow: despair that could add up to an affirmation of life, poignance that never stooped to self-pity, Mack Sennett farce that could dive into tragedy and come up smiling.

Truffaut solidified his reputation with two films that are still considered landmarks in modern cinema history. Shoot the Piano Player was both a sly, imitative tribute to the Warner Bros, shootem-ups of the '30s and the existential drama of a man (Charles Aznavour) who can no longer respond to life. Jules and Jim was a near-perfect evocation of Montparnassian fin de siecle life, informed with psychological observations of the '60s. A blend of saline tragedy and dulcet comedy, it reinforced the burgeoning reputation of Actress Jeanne Moreau.

Truffaut's later films have seemed, for the most part, to go too far out or too close in. Partly to encourage backers who were dismayed at the commercial anemia of his critical successes, Truffaut in The Soft Skin abandoned the visual conceits of, narrow and widening screen and rocketing flashbacks that characterized his previous works. Skin was a mild film of convention that won few admirers. Fahrenheit 451, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, was his only true failure, an atypically emotionless sci-fi attempt to show the future as nightmare. The fact, of course, that it was done in English by a director who could not speak the language made the project disaster-prone from the beginning.

Cinematic disappointments have not seemed to impede Truffaut's aplomb. If anything, he has grown more secure and relaxed. Though he is still a chain-smoker, he abandoned nail biting when one of his daughters took it up. In a field where jealousies unreel at every screening, he remains genial. His praise extends to every film maker but one--Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni. "That is the one director whose sensibilities I cannot get inside," he says, possibly because the aridity of Antonioni's films is diametrically opposite to Truffaut's abiding humanism. Perhaps his favorite cinematic hero became the subject last year of a classic appreciation: Hitchcock, published by Simon & Schuster. A series of interviews by Truffaut, the dialogue is an insightful exchange that says as much about the sensitive disciple as about the witty, deprecating master.

The disciple is too busy to do any more books, though he still feels that Director Howard Hawks, the grand old man of the American western, deserves one. Truffaut has completed work on one new movie and plans to start filming another this fall. Each, in a different way, reveals the Truffaut genre: Stolen Kisses, which will soon open in the U.S., shows the rebel as before--but grown to maturity. Again, he is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, the juvenile star of The 400 Blows. The new project, The Siren of Mississippi, is to be yet another salute to American cinema, a story of mail-order romance starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Before starting work on Mississippi, Truffaut intends to take a short va cation to resume his favorite indoor sport. Interested parties can find Francois where the Parisian parole officers located him nearly 20 years ago--at the movies.

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