Christopher Culver Francois Truffaut's second feature, TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE ("Shoot the Piano Player") is ostensibly an adaptation of a gritty noir crime novel by David Goodis. As the film opens, we see Chico (Albert Rémy) running through the dark streets of Paris from an unseen assailant. Chico enters a bar where his brother Charlie (Charles Aznavour) works playing piano in the evenings to dancing patrons. The one brother begs the other for help, "I've got to elude two criminals I scammed out of money," says Chico. Charlie is reluctant to get involved in his brother's sordid affairs, but he ends up doing that anyway, along with the bar's waitress Lena (Marie Dubois). As romance blossoms between Charlie and Lena, we flash back to an earlier time in his life when he was an aspiring concert pianist, a career path that was ultimately abandoned after tragic circumstances.Truffaut had made a big splash with his debut LES 400 COUPS ("The 400 Blows") a year earlier in 1959, which inaugurated the French New Wave with its innovations and flaunting of rules that defied the staid French filmmaking tradition of the preceding years. Still, LES 400 COUPS doesn't seem particularly disruptive to audiences today. It is with TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE that we find truly zany and fearless storytelling. The jump cuts, voiceovers, sexual frankness, and critique of the new consumerist society make it readily comparable to the early work of Truffaut's friend Jean-Luc Godard, as does the use of a crime novel as a mere plot skeleton around which the filmmaker could introduce his own concerns.In fact, the wildly swinging tone of the film is jarring. One minute it's jovial: when Charlie and Lena are kidnapped by the two men pursuing Chico, instead of a realistically threatening scene the four of them crack jokes like old pals. And yet at other points the film is full of true pathos: death, failed relationships, shattered dreams.Charles Aznavour was a legendary French crooner. (In fact, he still is, still giving concerts as I write this as he approaches a hundred.) Singers don't always make good actors, but here Aznavour is brilliant. Diverging from the source material, Truffaut choose to make Charlie introverted and full of self-doubt, and Aznavour's expressions and gestures perfectly capture this sympathetic character.While my own tastes in the French New Wave run to Godard more than Truffaut, I enjoyed this film. A lot of the humour is still effective today. With the intertwined plots of fleeing from criminals, budding romance, and flashback to days of yore, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER seems to have a lot more than its merely 81-minute running time.

elvircorhodzic SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER is a crime drama, which is an unusual combination between a noir and a musical melodrama. Film is based on the novel Down There by David Goodis.The main protagonist is a washed-up classical pianist who works in a popular bar. He actually runs away from his own tragic past. A young waitress is falling in love with him. She knows the truth about the famous concert pianist. However, he does not believe in his career and he has a fear of a new love. Meanwhile, his problematic brothers ask him for a help. He inadvertently gets dragged in a mafia showdown...The main protagonist is a victim of unforeseen circumstances. He was haunted by his past and relives his tragedy in the present. An unusual narrative structure, which through retrospection reveals the truth, is very difficult to follow. There is a lot of experimentation with serious topics in frivolous scenes and situations. This film, with such an approach, becomes a kind of farce. Tragic scenes are mixed with humorous monologues and distasteful scenes. Art is a kind of consolation from unpleasant memories and fear.The characterization is, despite a "silent" hero and a series of "noisy" episodic characters, excellent. Charles Aznavour as Charlie Kohler/ Edouard Saroyan is double, but impersonal character. His story is very touching, but his actions are very questionable. He was lost in his own monologues and humorous tones. Marie Dubois as Léna is an attractive young woman who tries to save a lost pianist. Nicole Berger as Thérèse Saroyan is a woman from the past and the character who brings the truth to the story. Michèle Mercier as Clarisse is a "girl next door", who in somewhat naughty way revives the main hero. Ms. Mercier is a sight for sore eyes.This film is like a good stew, in which some spices are still superfluous.

MissSimonetta Shoot the Piano Player (1960) has quite the generic pedigree, spitting in the face of genre altogether: it is part gangster movie, part slapstick comedy, part melancholic romance. I suppose this bizarre hybridity is partially responsible for the movie's poor performance critically and commercially upon its original release. Yet none of these contrasting elements clash, making for one of the most unique and wildly entertaining movies of the French New Wave. I'll applaud any movie which can make me laugh my head off one minutes and then leave me contemplative and sad the next. It must be seen to be believed. The director Francois Truffaut was a true treasure and it saddens me to this day that we lost him too soon.

dlee2012 Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player is of the same experimental vein as Godard's Breathless but lacks just a little of the latter film's vitality and energy.A slightly darker work, it provides perhaps more insight into humanity with its well-executed studies of its lead characters' motivations.Nevertheless, the film is also a prime example of auteur theory and showcases many nouvelle vague techniques, such as jump cuts, on-location shooting, fluid camera work and moments on incongruous, typically French, humour. All of this serves to further undermine the traditional domination of stage-bound realist films that had dominated French cinema throughout the 1950s.Charles Aznavour performs well in the lead role of the pianist with the broken spirit. As another reviewer points out, the film begins with a close-up of the inner workings of his piano reflecting the fact that the film will attempt to show the inner-workings of his heart. Indeed, it is this that is the pre-occupation of all the long dialogues throughout the film as his psyche is explored, even by the gangsters who abduct him and in the early voice-overs.He is a character too timid to have a voice of his own; it is the piano that provides him with his boldness to entertain. Indeed, Aznavour's timid and wonderfully human anti-hero is an extremely welcome antidote to the macho posturing still found in Hollywood films to this very day. He is real and audiences can readily relate to him. Indeed, the centrepiece of the film, the flashback sequence, is moving as it details his fall from grace after his struggle to break away from his family and overcome the bad reputation of his surname.The bumbling but ultimately murderous gangsters also subvert notions that people with guns are in some way heroic - they are shown to be stupid fools, inept but brutally dangerous.As in Godard's Breathless, there are small attacks on American consumerism throughout yet, at the same time, this film embraces aspects of the noir style. Indeed, it was originally based on a pulp novel though it far transcends these genre writing origins to become a unique, high culture work of film art.Ultimately, this film along with Breathless, Band a Part and Jules et Jim firm established the nouvelle vague movement as a uniquely French phenomenon that defined the 1960s. Subversive, innovative and a thorough rejection of the now-stagnant older style of studio film-making it remains a unique, fresh vision to this day. Highly recommended.