Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection
by Fran?ois Truffaut
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Mich?le Mercier, Nicole Berger, Serge DavriDirector: Fran?ois Truffaut
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard
Writer: Fran?ois Truffaut
Editor: Claudine Bouch?
Editor: C?cile Decugis
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Writer: David Goodis
Writer: Marcel Moussy
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 92 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-06
Studio: Astor Pictures Corporation
Movie Reviews of Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: Shoot the Piano Player is Classic French Cinema.
Summary: 5 Stars
I experienced the new 35mm presentation of Fran?ois Truffaut's 1960 film, Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste), in my local theater over the weekend. Nearly fifty years after it was first released, Truffaut's film remains as mesmerizing as ever. It was the French director's second venture into nouvelle vague, following his 1959 film that sparked the French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows, and made just before one of his most highly-acclaimed films, Jules and Jim.
Adapted from the David Goodis novel, Down There (sometimes titled Shoot the Piano Player), Truffaut's film combines elements of American film noir and comedy in telling the story of melancholic Charlie Koller(Charles Aznavour), a former concert pianist (known as Edouard Saroyan), who now plays honky-tonk piano in a Paris saloon. The film's memorable opening scene depicts Charlie's older brother, Chico (Albert R?my), running into a lampost as he flees from two gangsters. A passerby then assists Chico, but is more interested in debating the pros and cons of marriage than Chico's injuries. Edouard's wife Th?r?se (Nicole Berger) commits suicide, prompting him to take on a new identity and life as Charlie. While playing piano in the bar, Charlie soon finds himself entangled in a love affair with a waitress, Lena (Marie Dubois), while his brother Chico attempts to involve him into his world of crime. Truffaut engages his viewer with an entertaining mix of noir, pathos, gags, jump cuts, guns, and thugs, making this film an unforgettable experience in French cinema.
The Criterion Special Edition Double-Disc Set includes a newly restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Raoul Coutard; audio commentary by film scholars Annette Insdorf and Peter Brunette; exclusive new video interviews with actors Charles Aznavour and Marie Dubois and director of photography Raoul Coutard; a rare interview with Fran?ois Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman; two documentary excerpts featuring Truffaut on the film and the source novel; "The Music of George Delerue," an illustrated audioessay; Dubois' screen test; the theatrical trailer; and a 28-page booklet featuring film critic Kent Jones, an interview with Truffaut, and the director on Aznavour and Dubois. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
Summary of Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection
Francois Truffaut is drunk on the possibilities of cinema in this, his most playful, anarchic film. Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of the mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour, in a triumph of hangdog deadpan) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair. Loaded with gags, guns, clowns, and thugs, this razor-sharp homage to the American gangster film is pure nouvelle vague.A man runs through deserted night streets, stalked by the lights of a car. It's a definitive film noir situation, promptly sidetracked--yet curiously not undercut--by real-life slapstick: watching over his shoulder for pursuers, the running man charges smack into a lamppost. The figure that helps him to his feet is not one of the pursuers (they've oddly disappeared) but an anonymous passerby, who proceeds to escort him for a block or two, genially schmoozing about the mundane, slow-blooming glories of marriage. The Good Samaritan departs at the next turning, never to be identified and never to be seen again. And the first man--who, despite this evocative introduction, is not even destined to be the main character of the movie--immediately resumes his helter-skelter flight from an as-yet-unspecified and unseen menace.
The opening of Shoot the Piano Player, Fran?ois Truffaut's second feature film, is one of the signal moments of the French New Wave--an inspired intersection of grim fatality and happy accident, location shooting and lurid melodrama, movie convention and frowzy, uncontainable life. At this point in his career--right after The 400 Blows, just before his great Jules and Jim--the world seemed wide for Truffaut, as wide as the Dyaliscope screen that he and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deployed with unprecedented spontaneity and lyricism. Anything might wander into frame and become part of the flow: an oddball digression, an unexpected change of mood, a small miracle of poetic insight.
The official agenda of the movie is adapting a noirish story by American writer David Goodis, about a celebrated concert musician (Charles Aznavour) hiding out as a piano player in a saloon. He's on the run as much as the guy--his older brother--in the first scene. But whereas the brother is worried about a couple of buffoonish gangsters, Charlie Koller is ducking out on life, love, and the possibility that he might be hurt, or cause hurt, again. Decades after its original release, Shoot the Piano Player remains as fresh, exhilarating, and heartbreaking--as open to the magic of movies and life--as ever. --Richard?T. Jameson
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