Two or three things we know about Jean-Luc Godard | Roger Ebert

“Breathless” was sort of a gangster picture, if it was a picture about anything. Belmondo brandished a big revolver and talked with a cigarette in his mouth, like Bogart, and he had a moll and he was doomed to die. Audiences liked the movie as much for Godard's unrehearsed approach to camera technique as for Belmondo's performance.

Godard got into movies backwards. With Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais, he began as a film critic for the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Like all film critics, he held the firm belief that if he had the money he could make a better film himself than most he had seen. In his case, this happened to be true.

First Truffaut quit his job as a critic and made a movie, “The 400 Blows.” It was astonishingly good. Then Resnais made “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” It was even better. Godard could wait no longer. He absconded with the petty cash fund of Cahiers du Cinema and started to make “Breathless." When his colleagues caught up with him, they behaved exactly as they should have. They told him to keep the money and supplied him with more funds. How simple this all seems in France! “Breathless” was eventually hailed as “the single most influential movie of the last 10 years.” By whom? Cahiers du Cinema, if you must know.

Despite this early success, Godard has not fared as well recently as his contemporaries. Resnais followed “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” with “Last Year at Marienbad” and the recent “Persona,” which has been hailed as a masterpiece in New York but hasn't been booked yet in Chicago.

Truffaut followed his first success with others, such as “Jules and Jim,” “Shoot the Piano Player,” and “Fahrenheit 451,” a recent excursion into color and English dialog.

But Godard, whose work is at least as interesting, has not gathered a similar following. His films are usually hard to find here, and it is heartening that several will play Chicago in the near future.