It is smaller, less obvious, things in the film, that make it work at all, for despite the good acting, and the detailed story, the film falls flat at times. At other times, it grabs at the viewer. As example, it is a crippled boy, Joseph (François Négret), who works in the kitchen and deals on the Black Market, and who the other boys mock and scorn, who turns in the headmaster and Jewish boys.

Why? Because he ended up taking the blame for the thievery at the school, rather than the school’s drunken old cook Madame Perrin (Jacqueline Paris). This is an explicable reaction from a boy unaware of the depth of his action's evil. All he wanted was vengeance on the headmaster, who he felt sold him out. In doing so, he became an accomplice to murder.

Unfortunately, these moments are not the bulk of the film, and it is not until the last twenty minutes or so, when the Gestapo comes calling, that the film really grabs a hold of the viewer, as the last scene does pack a great punch, even if it is telegraphed, for it does not strain one’s kitsch tolerance nor facial tissue supply.

Before that, however, the school and its students could be the very one from the Harry Potter series of children’s films, or even from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. The scenes they watch from a Charlie Chaplin short, The Immigrant, not only act as a contrast to the situation at hand - a nation occupied - but the digressive moment in the film has its antecedents in many other films on war and/or coming of age tales.

There are also nice moments of bonding, when the two boys freestyle some jazz piano as the rest of the school goes to the air raid shelter, and there are a few good scenes between them and the beautiful piano teacher, Davenne (Irène Jacob, in her screen debut). But much of the rest of the film has trite, predictable, and unneeded scenes of bullying, kids smoking behind buildings, razzing one another, etc. Yes, this has occurred from time immemorial, and flavors the film with a sense of banal realism, but these things could have been elicited in a 90-second montage, thus reducing the film from its 101 minute running time to about 80 minutes, a good quarter of which would have been the final meaty part.

Likely this was not done because Malle was trying to turn the story of his youth into hagiography and was not objective enough about the dramatic structural flaws in the screenplay. He likely felt that the suffusion of details, like Quentin’s bed-wetting, or the rest of the dormitory’s shared masturbations of 1001 Arabian Nights, would carry the film through to its powerful end. And it does, if limpingly, but not at the grand trot nor gallop of a great film. The fact that, in the penultimate scenes, it is an incidental look that Quentin shoots at his friend, Bonnet, that gives him away to the Gestapo inquisitor, is a great touch, but a savvy viewer is left wishing the rest of the film had been so well plotted.