François Truffaut's debut feature, made at the age of 27, captured the Cannes Film Festival prize for best direction as well as the American Film Critics' award for the best foreign film of the year. With it, Truffaut established himself at the forefront of the French nouvelle vague (New Wave), and the film's international success helped open the door for other insurgent film critics like himself to put their theories into practice. But even if Truffaut had never made another film, The 400 Blows would have earned him an enduring place in film history. Its semi-autobiographical story of a lad who is unwanted by his parents, bored by school and attracted to petty crime, is told with an energetic blend of comedy and sadness, compassion and blunt criticism that was to become Truffaut's unique trademark. Jean-Pierre Leaud makes his first appearance as Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel. The eminent French film critic and historian Georges Sadoul notes in his Dictionary of Films, “This warm and personal film...was shot entirely in locations and superbly captures the moods of the city that surround the boy. Its lyrically realistic and totally unsentimental portrait of adolescence has never been matched in the cinema.”