At the screening of La Sirène du Mississipi at the Film Festival of Ghent in 2014 the organizers had a little extra, namely a film called Los 4 Golpes. A short with a duration of three minutes (and with a Spanish title card by the way) in which Truffaut, as actor and director, himself starts hitting people with a newspaper and ultimately strangles a woman with her own scarf. Soon after that it becomes clear that it is a movie in a movie and then the end credits are shown. Made during a film festival in Mar del Plata, where Truffaut received the award for Jules et Jim, is this an amusing short of a great director. Los 4 Golpes was never intended to be shown to a large audience, but was rather a thank you to Cinematheque for the screening of many Hitchcock films in preparation for the director's famous Truffaut/Hitchcock interview.
2 Reviews
Truffaut's thank you note to the Cinémathèque in Brussels
timothy_persoon28 April 2016
Warning: Spoilers
4 Down, 396 Blows to go...an adorable short by Truffaut
Rodrigo_Amaro23 January 2023
A curious and very amusing short film directed and acted by François Truffaut, "Los 4 Golpes" ("The 4 Blows") presents the man and two female accomplices with a
murderous plot - there might be some reasoning behind the murder since they keep reading something on the newspaper which makes the trio very made and chasing each other in
this hotel/bar space. It owes its style to the silent film era and since they're all very expressive the experience is all fun and cool to see. I'll consider this a spur of the
moment idea, which end up being his very last short film made, and by that time he was already an important figure in the world of cinema with classics such as "The 400 Blows"
and "Shoot the Piano Player", so this was just something Truffaut wanted to do, show some skills, pay tribute to silent movies and make a funny movie. It's fun and it comes with
a nice plot twist. 6/10.
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