Over the next decade Autant-Lara had his most successful period with a number of commercial successes, many of them being adaptations of literary works with period settings, including Occupe-toi d'Amélie (Feydeau) in 1949, Le Blé en herbe (Colette) and Le Rouge et le Noir (Stendhal), both in 1954. This habit of relying on literary scripts and plots made Autant-Lara (and his regular screenwriters Aurenche and Bost) the target of sharp criticism by the young François Truffaut in his influential attack on the "tradition de qualité" which he saw as stifling originality in French cinema.François Truffaut, "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français", in Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 31, January 1954. As the ideas of the New Wave gathered strength, the subsequent films of Autant-Lara began to seem increasingly outdated."Claude Autant-Lara [obituary]", in The Times (London), 7 February 2000, p. 19.
