It can be painful to watch Truffaut try to replicate the American genres he championed as a critic in films like his Hitchcock homage "The Bride Wore Black" (1968) or the appallingly crude screwball outing "Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me" (1973); it calls to mind Kael's apt remark that he was a greater director than he allowed himself to be. Truffaut really managed to invoke an American genre successfully only once, in 1960's "Shoot the Piano Player," one of his fastest, most joyous and heartbreaking films, and then (as Godard did in "Breathless") only because he allowed himself to break free of film noir's genre constraints. That's not to say that there isn't enormous charm to be found in his entertainments, like the films that followed "The 400 Blows" in the Antoine Doinel cycle -- "Stolen Kisses," "Bed and Board" (1970) and, to a lesser extent, "Love on the Run" (1979). The character Jean-Pierre Liaud is playing in them is no longer the young Truffaut (the Antoine of "The 400 Blows" deserves the title of the Jerry Lewis comedy "The Delicate Delinquent," and the young man Antoine seemed destined to become is the one Liaud played in Godard's 1966 "Masculine-Feminine") but a bumbling comic everyman, and despite Truffaut's over-eagerness to please his audience, you'd have to be awfully grouchy to resist entirely their modest pleasures. His most successful comedy was the one that could have been the most precious and sentimental, "Small Change" (1976), a film whose ensemble cast is mostly schoolchildren. Its slip-ups -- occasional speechifying and moments when the kids have been directed to cartoon their responses -- don't diminish the glancing confidence of scenes like the one where a small boy cracks himself up while regaling his buddies with one of those nonsensical dirty jokes that kids revel in.

But it's "The Wild Child" (1970), one of the two masterpieces of the last half of Truffaut's career, that is the deepest of all of his examinations of the world of children. Based on the true story of an abandoned 11-year-old boy found in 1798 living in the woods of France as a wild animal, the film tells the story of the efforts of Dr. Jean Itard (beautifully played by Truffaut) to civilize the boy, whom he has named Victor (played, with equal beauty, by the young gypsy boy Jean-Pierre Cargol). There have been, over the years, some modish attempts to see in Itard's attempts to educate Victor Truffaut's defense of his own embourgoisement (in "Stolen Portraits" Truffaut's daughter Laura talks of seeing a Berkeley teacher encourage some high-school students to accept this interpretation). It's a dopey reading that ignores both the realities of the world Victor lived in (his only other fate would have been to be turned over to a home for "idiot" children) and Truffaut's own acknowledgement of the pain Victor's education causes both the boy and Itard. In this film, education equals love (the film's dedication to Jean-Pierre Lhaud reinforces that), and though neither comes without discipline, discipline does not preclude compassion. "The Wild Child" is not about accepting the ready-made roles and edicts of society, but about insisting that society's only moral authority comes from its ability to show justice. The film is shot in luminous black-and-white by Nestor Almendros, and it's frequent iris shots recall Griffith, as do the combination of its simplicity of means and depth of emotion.

The spirit of silent films is also present in the last masterpiece of Truffaut's career, "The Story of Adhle H." Another true story, this one of the youngest daughter of Victor Hugo who literally went mad with love for an English lieutenant she pursued to Montreal after he had romanced her, "The Story of Adhle H." recalls, in Isabelle Adjani's incandescent performance, a cunning version of the characters that Lillian Gish played in her films for director Victor Sjvstrvm and the magnesium flare Falconetti showed in Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc." (Falconetti, feeling as if she had given everything she had, never acted again, and Adjani has never equalled this performance.) Truffaut seems to be both outside of Adhle, studiously regarding her (literally in one scene, where he appears on the street as an officer she mistakes for her beloved) and inside her mad obsession. If we can imagine the characters of films talking to each other, then we can see Adhle as the perfect match for James Stewart's love-obsessed detective in "Vertigo." They have both reached the point of no return, and all we can do is watch them in fear and admiration. Without once denying Adhle's capacity for cruelty and deviousness (she nearly ruins the life of the man she is pursuing), Truffaut is on her side. To him, she's the representative muse of passion without limits, a Catherine who has crossed the line and left common sense behind. She is also perhaps the greatest example of Truffaut's capacity for compassion and for rigorous understanding. The kick of the movie, and its greatness, is that in Adhle's self-destruction lies her triumph, the realization of a love so perfect that the rest of the world, even the man who started her fire burning, is shut out. It is an image of triumph the film ends on: not the mad Adhle wandering the streets of Barbados in her black cape, a Bronte heroine transplanted to the tropics, but the young Adhle standing at the edge of the sea and quoting from her journal: "That a young girl shall walk over the sea, from the Old into the New World, to join her lover -- this, I shall accomplish." I choose to hear that line as Truffaut's parting words to us, the audience he had built all over the world, who had long ago become his paramours, just as his films had become his means of crossing the world's barriers.

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