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Amphibians in Movies   Jules and Jim (1962)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a classic of French New Wave cinema, made by Fracois Truffaut. It's still a lot of fun to watch now, a thousand years after it was made. In the years before and after World War I, Jules and Jim are two friends who fall in love with the same woman. She marries Jules, but then she falls in love with Jim. We watch their relationships evolve over the years. Jules writes books about dragonflies and other natural history. He says he may return to literature by writing a love story in which the characters are insects. (This was way before all those cartoon movies about bugs and ants.) At Jules' house near the Rhine River, in his little bedroom full of stuffed birds and pictures of centipedes, we see a small white wash basin full of water with 5 newts swimming in it. We don't know why the newts are there, but Jules is probably drawing them. This could not be more trivial, but nevertheless, it's one of the very few examples I've seen of salamanders in a movie, so Tais-Toi! There are four species of newts found in that part of France, but I have no idea which ones these are. If that matters to you, then you're even nuttier than I am.