Francois Truffaut followed up his excellent feature length directorial debut, the excellent crime drama The 400 Blows, with a quirky blend of comedy, crime noir, and drama with 1960's Shoot The Piano Player, based on a novel by American writer David Goodis. While the film lacks the intensity of his earlier feature, it's regardless a very well made and well acted film that reunited him with some of the actors he used in that first feature and that showed some interesting growth on Truffaut's part as a director.

Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour of And Then There Were None) plays honky-tonk piano in a grubby little bar in the heart of downtown Paris. While performing one night, his brother, Chico (Albert Remy), runs in and interrupts him. Chico's a career criminal and is one the run from Momo (Claude Monsard) and Earnest (Daniel Boulanger), two gangsters who'd like to do him some harm for what he's done to them.

Charlie sends Chico on his way and doesn't think much more about it until that night, when he walks home Lena (Marie Dubois), one of the waitresses that he works with, they notice that the two thugs are following them. Charlie finally heads home where he sleeps with a prostitute unbeknownst to his younger brother, Fido (Richard Kanayan), who lives in his apartment. When he wakes up the next morning and sends her on his way, he notices a suspicious car outside. When Charlie head outside to get to work, Momo and Earnest are outside waiting for him and they pull a gun on him and toss him in the back of their car. Their next stop is Lena's apartment, they grab her too and go for a little ride. Thankfully for Charlie and Lena, Earnest is a bad driver and the cops pull them over, which allows the two to escape. They head back to Lena's place where their mutual attraction for one another becomes obvious.

Once Charlie has slept with Lena, memories come drifting back to him and it's then that we find out he was once a renowned concert pianist named Edouard Saroyan. He rose to prominence a few years ago but when his wife committed suicide by leaping out of a window to her death, he more or less just gave up on life and that's how he ended up playing in bars.

Charlie's mind drifts back to the present, and it's then that he realizes that Momo and Earnest haven't forgotten about him, Lena, Fido or Chico. They're closing in on him, and soon he's going to have to do something about it.

Shoot The Piano Player starts off very much like a comedy, then turns into a crime story, then a character drama, then back to a crime story but all the while never loses touch with its comedic beginnings. It's an odd film, one that bounces around a fair bit, but it is exceptionally well photographed and benefits from a likeable lead in the form of Charles Aznavour. Considering that, as the liner notes state, his character is really a bit of a bastard, it's a testament to his skills in front of the camera that we care about him as much as we do. His chemistry acting alongside Marie Dubois is very effective and completely believable and one of the more interesting aspects of the film is watching their relationship grow, even if it is somewhat reluctantly.

Though the film plays out like a crime movie, it is very much a character piece more than anything else. There are a few long stretches in the film where not a lot really happens and in that sense, the pacing is strange but it gives us a chance to get to know the people in the movie better and makes them all the more human, warts and all. Truffaut does effectively build some great suspense towards the later part of the film, however, and things take a decidedly dark turn about the sixty minute mark. Shoot The Piano Player is a fairly brief film, clocking in at roughly eighty-one minutes in length and as such it is quite lean despite the aforementioned quieter moments.

The film also makes use of some excellent cinematography courtesy of Raoul Coutard (probably best known for his work on Godard's Week End). Once the action moves out of the heart of Paris and into the French countryside, the movie gets a bit of a face lift in terms of the visuals, and we're treated to some interesting wide angle shots that pull back from the action and give us more of a bird's eye view of what's happening, and interesting contrast to the earlier part of the film, which gets in closer to the characters as they're being developed.

Video:

This brand new 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen black and white transfer , supervised by director of photography Raoul Coutard, looks fantastic. Black levels are strong and deep and don't bury the fine detail in the background of the image at all. The grays look nice and stay fairly strong, as do the whites and this is a very well balanced image. There is some mild print damage in a few spots that shows up in the form of the odd scratch or speck here and there but these instances are few and far between. An understandable amount of film grain is also present throughout but it never proves to be distracting at all. In terms of digital problems there aren't any mpeg compression artifacts to note and neither is there any serious edge enhancement. The only really noticeable flaw is that there is some fairly heavy flickering in some scenes (you'll notice this right off the bat when the movie starts) but again, it's a minor issue. Criterion has done a bang up job in the visuals department on this release.