In her review of "Jules and Jim," Pauline Kael described the two men as "the kind of artists who grow up into something else ... the dedication to art of their youth becomes the civilizing influence in their lives." Truffaut himself has often been described along those lines, but less kindly ("the once-wild child" is how the critic Paul Coates accurately and somewhat meanly summed up the later Truffaut). The cliché of Truffaut's career is that he became the sort of bourgeois entertainer he decried as a young film critic. And, as with every cliché, there is some truth to that. Certainly the later films seem more the work of a pro going through the (often clumsy) motions than of a filmmaker seized by a personal compulsion. The amour fou of "The Woman Next Door" (1981) belongs more to the machinations of melodrama than to Truffaut's earlier explorations of where passion becomes madness. It looks especially bad next to "The Soft Skin" (1964), never particularly well regarded, and a film whose coldness makes it tough to warm to, but which is ripe for rediscovery. Made after "Jules and Jim," it is as ruthlessly constrained and airless as that film was exhilarating. This portrait of a successful intellectual publisher (Jean Desailly) who begins an affair with a young stewardess (Françoise Dorlèac, the sister of Catherine Deneuve, who was to die three years later in a car crash) burrows unsparingly under the surface of bourgeois life, but with something more akin to self-loathing than superiority. In their fine new biography "Truffaut," Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana suggest the director was dealing with his own infidelities and perhaps the experience was too painful, too close to home.

The most entertaining of his later films, "The Last Metro" (1980), the story of a theatrical troupe trying to carry on with its business in occupied France, is also the most suspect. Though the central character is a Jewish director in hiding, the film suggests an apologia for the French who carried on with life as if nothing untoward were happening. And the pleasant, inconsequential "Day for Night" (1973), in which Truffaut himself plays the director of a soapy melodrama, is an apologia for cinematic mediocrity. "It is as much trouble to make a bad film as a good one," Truffaut wrote in the 1975 essay "What Do Critics Dream About?" And perhaps Truffaut, who now knew firsthand the difficulty of making movies, saw "Day for Night" as penance for the hard line he had taken as a young critic. But that expression of solidarity with anyone who steps behind a camera cannot disguise the uncomfortable fact that the sort of movie deadwood Truffaut looks kindly on in "Day for Night" is what makes life hell for filmmakers like him and those he championed.

Besides, what was best about Truffaut as a critic was the hard line he took. Truffaut the critic has things to answer for, namely the blinkered hero-worshipping auteur theory, and the criticism collected in his essential "The Films in My Life" often reveals very bad judgments. But just as he wrote, "I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse," Truffaut was not interested in writing reviews that did not pulse. Heedlessly partisan, alternating between love letters and threats, Truffaut wrote with a passion for movies as a vital, breathing thing that can make the most well-reasoned criticism look wan. (One of the reasons that a smart critic like Anthony Lane never seems more than a witty and entertaining stylist is that he appears embarrassed at declaring his enthusiasms without employing the buffer of irony.)

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