This film by the French director François Truffaut, who died in 1984, is one of his best, a splendidly evocative portrayal of a desolate boyhood that still haunts the memory.

It's a unique effort to get inside the mind of a 12-year-old whose one ambition is to go to sea, but whose only future is reform school.

Some of the street scenes, with the boy utterly alone, ring desperately true.