Cheap Shoot the Piano Player (DVD) (Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois) (François Truffaut) Price

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Customer Reviews of Shoot the Piano Player

A Funny and Emotional Ride
Truffaut's "Shoot The Piano Player" is a remarkable thing: a funny and light-on-its-feet movie about despair. The director combines the grittiness of David Goodis' noir novel "Down There" with his own more optimistic humanism and the full stylistic arsenal of the French "New Wave" to create a film that manages to say as much about Art and Life as any really good, satisfying book. Charles Aznavour plays the timid Edouard, aka Charlie, a piano player in a cheap bar who is really a classical concert pianist hiding from a catastrophic, tragic history. A pretty new waitress knows who he is and encourages him to live again. But as in most American gangster movies, you can't run away from your past. Truffaut includes an amazing amount of philosophy about women, Fate, success, failure, marriage; all couched in a runaway style that is familiar to us today, but must have been shocking and exhilirating back in 1960. (The famous cut to the "old woman dropping dead" could have come directly from MAD magazine.) And who hasn't sometimes felt bedeviled by fortune and shyness: we greatly identify with Charlie. The comically incompetent yet sinister villains are also a great touch. This movie feels as fresh as it must have 40 years ago.

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Sometimes the book is just better!
Maybe one shouldn't compare the movie and book versions of a story. But sometimes that's inevetibable. And sometimes the movie actually improves on the book, ie. "In a Lonely Place." However, in the case of "Shoot the Piano Player," based on the book "Down There," by David Goodis, I can't say this is so. The look of the movie has that gritty noir feel, but all the time one feels as if they're watching the characters in a goldfish bowl ? from a great remove. You don't really get to know the characters or their motivations. In the book, this is much more clear and makes for a much more involving experience. Also, the addition of the character Fido (the piano player's younger brother) adds little to the story. In novel and movie we don't really get a great feel for why the waitress does what she does, but in the novel we get more of a feel for it and that does make a difference. It also makes a difference that we know more of the piano player's background, that he served with Merrill's Marauders in World War II, that, after losing his first wife, he went on a binge of anger and hate and fighting that finally led him to be the "docile" person he is when we meet him. This is little explained in the movie. Some of it's there, but much of it isn't and without it the character just seems a cypher. Read the book, watch the movie and decide for yourself.

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MR CHARLIE
This luminous little movie contains 2 of the greatest scenes ever put on film. Charlie, a piano player in a seedy Paris bar, has locked away his heart so even he can't get to it. A young woman who works at the same bar is determined to crash through the wall he has constructed around himself. Through her, his painful past is discovered and the promise of the present ends in the disolution of hope. Truffaut is constantly surprising us with the unexpected. There are car chases & kidnappings & excapes and even oaths acted out; and all with an air of the inevitable. There's never been another film like it. The scene where the barmaid takes him home & they sleep together consists of 360 degree pans around the room with cuts of the couple settling into each others' arms as they sleep. It is one of the most poignant & beautiful scenes ever filmed. (The pans with goldfish feeding at the top of their aquarium are expecially touching.) And there is a scene of the hero Charlie, going to his piano audition, that is done with such economy of style that the mixture of clashing feelings comes flooding out. 'Don't shoot the piano player; he's doing the best he can.' Not to be missed.