Shoot the Piano Player

Shoot the Piano Player is the English title of Tirez sur le pianiste, a film released in 1960, directed by François Truffaut.

Related Topics:
Film - 1960 - François Truffaut

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A washed-up classical pianist, Charlie (Charles Aznavour), bottoms out after his wife's suicide stroking the keys in a Parisian dive bar. The waitress, Lena (Marie Dubois), is falling in love with Charlie, who it turns out is not who he says he is. When his brothers get in trouble with gangsters, Charlie inadvertently gets dragged into the chaos and is forced to rejoin the family he once fled. Truffaut's highly stylised melodrama employs all of the hallmarks of French New Wave cinema: extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence camera shots, sudden jump-cutting and more.

Related Topics:
Charles Aznavour - Parisian - Marie Dubois - French New Wave

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Truffaut's film is loosely based on the novel Shoot The Piano Player by David Goodis. The film shares the novel's bleak plot about a man hiding from his shattered life by doing the only thing he knows how to do, while remaining unable to escape the past. However, Truffaut's work resolves itself into a tribute to the American genre of literary and cinematic noir, with stylistic accents that are overly apparent and somewhat to its detriment. The pianist’s baby brother, Fido, was not present in the book — his presence in the film adds a save-the-innocent-child element to what was an already complete study of the havoc that grown men and women wreak on themselves and those around them.

Related Topics:
David Goodis - Noir

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