Review of Wild Child, The (aka L`Enfant Sauvage)

Introduction

A distinctly Gallic flavour this week with the release of so many classic Truffaut films -Monsieur you are really spoiling us.

When a child is found in the woods of France in the 1700`s he is chained up in the local stables. Doctors in Paris hear about him and request that he be sent to them for examination. One young Doctor believes it may be possible to `civilise` the child even though he is unable to speak and is apparently deaf. Doctor Itard (Francois Truffaut) takes him home to his house in the country where the housekeeper begins to care for the boy they name `Victor`.

Before Elephant Man made disfigurement a study of humanity this film looked at the nature of civilisation and how we learn to conform.

Video

Time for a rant about the very sad condition of this film. It is poor with lots of blotches, marks and at one point I swear I saw a hair that must have been in the projector when they originally transferred it. For a film that was only made in 1969 it is such a shame that it has been so poorly treated.

It is hard to tell from the film but it has the appearance of an old movie complete with fades on close-up as each scene closes.

Audio

Obviously with a French soundtrack this is a bit of a trial but somehow it wouldn`t be the same dubbed into English. To hear once again the mellifluous tones of Monsieur Truffaut is to remember his part as the scientist in ` Close Encounters.` There is no background hiss and the dialogue is clear if not comprehensible to me.

The soundtrack music is by Vivaldi.

The script was written by Truffaut but is based on a true story about `L`enfant savauge` found in woods outside Paris. The Doctor who treated and adopted him left a journal, upon which Truffaut based his script.

Features

Another budget issue to go with the lack of decent print there is the lack of any extras other than the trailer. They treated Hitchcock better than this!

Conclusion

Having watched this many years ago I was looking forward to a good quality film on a decent DVD. Well, I still enjoyed the film shame about the DVD. The wild boy and the sympathetic character of the Doctor played by Truffaut really enhance the story. It is not high drama but an account about human relationships built from a very unpromising start.

What the people who make these DVDs seem to fail to understand is that the pictures themselves also tell the story; moving pictures get-it! The story can only be half told if the film stock has deteriorated so much. Alas, once again the film has crashed onto the disk without being cleaned up in any way and will fly out of the factory straight into the (bargain) bin. The market is surely there for classic films that have been tended with loving care. As part of Francois Truffaut body of work this film and all his others deserved a thoughtful retrospective. What I am trying to say is don`t buy it and complain to your M.P!