Trivia for
Les quatre cents coups (1959) More at IMDbPro »

• When Antoine and Rene are suspended from school, they go gallivanting around the town. At one point they pass a wall of posters and flyers, and they pull off a picture of a woman. The woman is Harriet Andersson in a shot from Ingmar Bergman's Sommaren med Monika (1953), also about two young lovers who ran away from home to "live their own life."
  
  
• The title of the film comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups", meaning "to raise hell".
  
  
• Dedicated to film theorist André Bazin.
  
  
• Director Cameo: [François Truffaut] is seen riding next to Antoine in the centrifuge ride at the fair, and can then be seen smoking a cigarette just outside the ride.
  
  
• All spoken lines in the film are dubbed over again by the actors themselves, save for a few minor and trivial parts. For instance, during the last scene, the sound of Antoine's footsteps was added during editing - the truck that the camera rested upon produced too much noise. Shooting on the streets of Paris, as many films of the French New Wave did, was often hectic and re-dubbing everything allowed François Truffaut to not have to worry about lugging bulky and expensive sound equipment around, and more importantly he would not have to worry about a street scene having too much background noise. This made shooting faster and easier.
  
  
• All the young actors who unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Antoine were used in the classroom scenes.
  
  
• When Antoine's father finally nodded to the cinema business, realizing it is Rivette's "Paris nous appartient", he said: "Si c'est un complot..." And a 'complot' (conspiracy), really, is the central issue of the Rivette's film.
  
  
• The poem written on the board is 'Épitaphe Pour Un Lièvre' by Jean Richepin. It is an Alexandrine poem i.e. comprised of lines of twelve syllables, typical of modern French poetry.
  
  
• The names of two Frenchmen noted for work in film - Leo Joannon (director) and Tommy Desserre (composer) - are seen on boards outside theatres during the film.
  
  
• Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis) was a Roman satiric poet of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
  
  
• The Finnish title of the movie, "400 kepposta", is a gross mistranslation of the French one, meaning "400 practical jokes", in stead of "400 blows". Also the Finland's Swedish title, "400 spratt", is a similar mistranslation.
  
  
• François Truffaut's first film to be released on the Blu-Ray Disc format.
  
  

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