Its also a fascinating study of flawed humanity. Shoot The Piano Player is an entertaining film, even though its hijacking of an American crime novel for its plot demands that the viewer accept the idea of vicious French gangsters without laughing. Truffaut has taken the word noir far too literally. Sometimes its a blessing, though, as half the film was apparently shot while the lighting crew was on vacation: entire scenes vanish into pools of blackness, with only the subtitles to telegraph the action. There are portions of the film, however, which sag unforgivably, particularly when Eddie and his criminal brothers are sitting around the table violating the cardinal rule of filmmaking: show, dont tell. Theres way too much expository dialogue here. His inability to verbalize any emotion not directly related to his own desires or ambitions is simultaneously the engine which drives his life and the weight which inevitably crushes it. The film goes back and forth between scenes of crime and domesticity, and Aznavours portrayal of Eddie gives us one of the most perfectly, terribly hollow characters ever seen on-screen. This is an interesting story, and the screenplay tells it fairly well. His new romance is with the bars waitress, played perfectly by the beautiful Marie Dubois. Eddie must defend his brother, must rejoin the family he fled for a life in the rarefied air of classical music, even as hes just stumbling into the beginnings of the first human relationship hes had since his wifes death. Enter Chino, Eddies older brother and a lowlife, on the run from two gangsters. When we meet him, hes working in a crappy Parisian dive, playing a battered upright even Tom Waits wouldnt touch.

It nearly reduces the story from a study of the damage adults wreak on themselves and those around them, to a save-the-endangered-child melodrama.Įddie (Charles Aznavour) is a former classical pianist who abandoned his career after his wifes suicide. A major characterpianist Eddies baby brother, Fidowas not present in the book and seems to have been added to make the plot more gripping or emotionally resonant, but this addition was a mistake.

Shoot The Piano Player, by Francois Truffaut, shares these themes, but as a French tribute to the uniquely American literary/cinematic noir genre, it makes its stylistic borrowing apparent, sometimes to its detriment. When his past comes for him, he cant escape, no matter how badly he wants to, and when hes pulled in, he drags innocents with him. Shoot The Piano Player by David Goodis is a poetic, bleak story about a man who hides from his shattered life by doing the only thing he knows how to do in the most degraded circumstances possible.

Lets just get this out of the way: the book is better.

Shoot the piano player david goodis