Steven Spielberg suggested the English title after the literal translation, “Pocket Money,” turned out to be taken by a 1972 Paul Newman film. The following year, François Truffaut would appear in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Truffaut had been collecting anecdotes about children since the time of The 400 Blows, jotting down fragments for years before he had anything resembling a script. By 1972 the whole project was a ten-page synopsis, and even once he committed to making it, the shooting stayed episodic and loose, left open to what happened on set.

That approach became SMALL CHANGE (1976), co-written with Suzanne Schiffman and shot in the town of Thiers after Truffaut scouted locations and cast local children alongside professionals. The film follows a loose group of kids in a small French town, among them a motherless boy beginning to notice girls and another enduring physical abuse, their ordinary days assembled into something episodic rather than plotted.

Some of what made it to screen was autobiographical, including a first kiss drawn from Truffaut's own childhood. The rough cut ran three hours before being trimmed to its final length.

The film did well in France, the US, Germany, Scandinavia and Japan. Only The 400 Blows and The Last Metro were more popular among Truffaut's own films domestically. It earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film, and Pauline Kael called it that rarity, a poetic comedy that's really funny. That balance of tenderness and comic observation is still what makes it one of Truffaut's warmest films.