So this is Truffaut’s most famous movie; along with Godard, he’s the other big name of the French New Wave. This seems a bit less formally avant-garde than Godard, though — it has the long tracking shots and the low-budget realism and lack of sentimentality, but none of the jump cuts or deliberate stylistic tricks of something like Breathless (which came out a year after this). In terms of technique, it feels like a transitional fossil between Renoir and Godard.

Beyond technique, this is the (semi-autobiographical) story of a boy who gets into trouble at school and home, and things escalate — he runs away from home, gets caught stealing, goes to prison, and is sent off to a reform camp. It’s well done and unflinching, and I found it very hard to watch.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the title (I kept expecting some notable scene of someone being beaten 400 times, but it never appeared), apparently it’s a weirdly literal translation of a French idiom that means “raising hell.”