Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Zéro de Conduite
[Zero for Conduct] came out in 1933 and was banned 
in France until 1946. This innovative film, only 41 minutes long, depicts daily 
life at a repressive French boarding school for boys. Cruel teachers give the boys 
so many zeros for poor conduct that the boys rebel and take over the school. 
One of the film’s most engaging scenes is the one in which the boys engage in a 
pillow fight, marching in slow motion through swirling feathers. This film about 
the childhood underground’s victory became a model for future films, including 
François Truffaut’s 
Les Quatre Cents Coups
[The 400 Blows].
In England, 
Th
e Belles of St. Trinian’s
(1954) set a pattern for humorous films 
about girls’ schools: constant high jinks and rebellion in a large, venerable school 
building. The spirited St. Trinian’s girls throw smoke bombs, burn down build-
ings, steal a racehorse, and fight with sticks and pillows. A later American film, 
Th
e Trouble with Angels
(1966), similarly highlights outrageous pranks. Mary 
(Hayley Mills) and her best friend Rachel ( June Harding) respond to roll call 
with fake names, take fellow students on a tour of the nuns’ cloister, fill sugar 
bowls with bubble bath, and blow such enormous smoke rings that a nun calls 
the fire department. The school’s Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell) handles cri-
ses so well that Mary eventually decides to follow her example and become a nun. 
In the film’s last scene Mary waves goodbye to her friends, perhaps anticipating 
poetic justice: students in her future classes playing pranks of their own.
The lighthearted comedy 
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 
(1986) portrays warfare be-
tween high school students and school administrators. Ferris (Matthew Brod-
erick) is a teenage trickster hero. Although his elaborate pranks fool his parents 
and teachers, he cannot deceive his sister Jeanie ( Jennifer Grey) or Dean Rooney 
( Jeffrey Jones), whose greatest desire is to make Ferris stay in high school for one 
more year. Through a clever set-up of electronic devices, Ferris convinces his par-
ents that he is much too ill to go to school; then, with his best friends Cameron 
(Allan Ruck) and Sloane (Mia Sera), he drives off to the big city for a day of fun. 
After many high jinks, he makes it home just in time to greet his parents and 
foil Dean Rooney’s plot to prove that he has been playing hooky. This subversive 
movie has become such a classic that it has engendered its own traditions, with 
lines of dialogue printed on T-shirts and recited at parties by teenage fans.
In the more serious film 
Au Revoir les Enfants
[Goodbye, Children] (1987), 
directed by Louis Malle, boys at a Catholic boarding school in France during 
World War II suffer from the proximity of German soldiers. Julien Quentin 
(Gaspard Manesse), one of the school’s most intelligent and sensitive students, 
becomes friends with a new student, Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejitö). After seeing 

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Contexts 135
Jean perform a religious ritual with candles late at night, Julien realizes that his 
new friend is Jewish. Malle brilliantly juxtaposes play and games with scenes 
involving German soldiers. In one scene, boys on stilts try to knock each other 
down and shout insults at each other: “Lion heart! Pig face! Flea brain!” A longer 
segment of the film shows the boys playing Capture the Flag, playfully compet-
ing with each other while adults wage war. At the film’s end, Gestapo officers 
capture Jean and two other boys. This sad, moving film reflects Malle’s own ex-
perience as a child at school in France during World War II.
Some presentations of teenagers’ troubles take the form of horror movies. In