Movie about a movie who's director is the director of the movie's movie. Nice to have a look behind the scenes of film making, although much of it looks rather staged, including bad acting and over-acting. Which makes the fictional movie about people making a movie really looks like people making a fictional movie. In a movie that you don't really like, sometimes there's one scene that almost makes up for the rest of the movie. A scene that you will probably never forget. Like the Japanese guy doing a karaoke act of the Sex Pistols in Lost In Translation, here the WOW scene is the short cat intermezzo. Silence... tension...touched... A moment of true movie magic.

Director Ferrand (François Truffaut) struggles with many challenges to finish shooting his film "Je vous presente Pamela". Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) is a British actress struggling with personal issues. This film follows the many people associated with the production.This is a classic film from iconic French director François Truffaut. He's playing with many modern meta filmmaking ideas. It is a film within a film. It has quasi-documentary techniques. The characters are a little hard to keep track. Other than Bisset and Truffaut, I'm not familiar with any of the other actors. It makes it harder to follow. The most memorable are little filmmaking triumphs like the candle and the cat. This is a movie at the foremost front.

Considered one of Truffaut's finest films and an homage to the filmmaking process, this movie is about a French cast and crew in the process of making a movie. There are a number of smaller stories with the people involved as they reveal themselves through the shoot, and the movie highlights the difficulties from a director's point of view – time pressure, various idiosyncrasies of the actors, and the complexities of getting shots just right. Truffaut himself played the director, which was interesting to see and think about (you know, directing himself directing). The movie was reasonably good and it held my interest, but it was not great, because the behind-the-scenes action was less interesting to me. Maybe some of that is because the behind-the-scenes aspects have had more exposure since 1973 when the film was made, and it was more of a novelty then. I have to also say that with the exception of Nathalie Baye, I didn't care all that much about the cast and characters, which was probably also part of the problem. Worth watching though.

A committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.I find it interesting that in French the term "American night" means the same as our term "day for night", wherein scenes filmed during the day appear to be shot at night (although discerning eyes can still tell the difference). Why "American night"? Interesting.One of the film's themes is whether or not films are more important than life for those who make them, its many allusions both to film-making and to movies themselves (perhaps unsurprising given that Truffaut began his career as a film critic who championed cinema as an art form). The film opens with a picture of Lillian and Dorothy Gish, to whom it is dedicated. In one scene, Ferrand opens a package of books he had ordered: they are books on directors he admires such as Luis Buñuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Ernst Lubitsch, Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson.