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Shoot the Piano Player
starring: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier, Serge Davri
directed by: François Truffaut

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Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302784091
Format: Black & White, Digital Video Transfer, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 6302784093
Label: Astor Pictures Corporation
Manufacturer: Astor Pictures Corporation
Publisher: Astor Pictures Corporation
Release Date: April 28, 1998
Running Time: 92 minutes
Studio: Astor Pictures Corporation
Theatrical Release Date: July 23, 1962
Sales Rank: 33534

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Editorial Review:

Description:
Truffaut calls Shoot the Piano Player "a pastiche of the Hollywood B-film," and in his comedie noire, suicide and murder exist side by side with slapstick humor. This French New Wave classic centers on a once-famous concert pianist (Charles Aznavour) who is now the piano player in a seedy Parisian bar, where he is surrounded by gangsters. Georges Delerue's eloquent piano music sets the wistful tone that pervades Truffaut's stunning, existential essay on the capriciousness of fate.

Amazon.com essential video:
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, François 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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Shoot the Piano Player is Classic French Cinema.
I experienced the new 35mm presentation of François 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 ... Read More

Rating:

- Greatest Film of the French New Wave (Truffaut's Masterpiece)
The crown jewel of the French New Wave and Truffaut's underrated masterpiece--this bittersweet, melancholy film is a comic gangster B-movie, a tragic romance, an innocent drama of the human condition which the absurd hero Charlie can only make sense of through the music of his piano.

Rating:

- Offbeat, undisciplined, sprawling, funny, sad, goofy, loving, uncategorizable
Before there was Jim Jarmusch, before there was Quentin Tarentino, before there were the Coen Brothers, there was Francois Truffaut and the whole French New Wave. Films that we consider wild and radical today are actually old hat, as this type of bold, irreverent, sassy, rule-breaking, in-your-face cinema has now been with us at least half a century. Sadly, many Americans probably think "New Wave" is a kind of bad dance music from the 80s.

Truffaut's second film, from 1960 (!), deals with a lot of Hollywood staples, but he freshens it up, even more than he appears to give himself credit for, with the very direct, very informal French style of movie-making (and, I'd also add, living). His bold confidence shows itself in the first scene. It begins in the middle of action, without ... Read More

Rating:

- Shoot the Piano Player
This quirky crime film by the great Truffaut mixes sight-gag comedy with suspense, resulting in a superbly nutty homage to the 1940s film noirs he so admired. French crooner Aznavour is terrific as the timid keyboardist on the outs with the mob. Filling the screen with inventive visuals and advancing an ad-hoc plotline with plenty of false digressions, Truffaut gives this tale the exhilarating feel of a spontaneous spoof. Based on the novel by David Goodis, "Player" is a brilliant tribute to the spirit of noir and the French New Wave.

Rating:

- The PIANO PLAYER is music to my ears.......
I am a great fan of the late, great French director, Francois Truffaut. I must confess that I haven't seen nearly enough of his films. It was so great to add SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER to the list of his films that I have watched, and it is definitely a great one. PIANO PLAYER is a cross between French new wave, film noir, slapstick comedy and a tribute to American gangster movies. Based on DOWN THERE, a novel by David Goodis, this 1960 film features a piano player with a past (Charles Aznavour). Though, he plays nightly at a honky tonk, this man once packed concert halls and had a classical repertoire. We find about that later. Taking the name "Charles," he has started his life over with a new, adopted identity. What's more, he has tried to turn his back on the shadey dealings of his brothers. ... Read More

VHS : Shoot the Piano Player